<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>you’ve expressed explicitly your contempt for matrimony (some things you do for money and some you do for love, love, love) by thomasthorne</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29399583">you’ve expressed explicitly your contempt for matrimony (some things you do for money and some you do for love, love, love)</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/thomasthorne/pseuds/thomasthorne'>thomasthorne</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>esoterica [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Thick of It (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst with a Happy Ending, Developing Relationship, M/M, Mutual Pining, Post-Canon</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 09:35:50</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>25,319</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29399583</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/thomasthorne/pseuds/thomasthorne</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>“You think you’re considerate and attentive?”</p><p>“For you? Yeah.” And then he adds, “Not for anyone else. Christ.”</p><p>or, a chronicle of a decaying relationship, a convoluted interrogation of why things seem so complicated when love’s very simple and shouldn’t burn.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Adam Kenyon/Fergus Williams</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>esoterica [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2302529</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>62</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>you’ve expressed explicitly your contempt for matrimony (some things you do for money and some you do for love, love, love)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>adamfergus nation im so sorry<br/>this is for acb but mainly eloise. this fic has consumed my entire life for the past month and i honestly feel very insane rn but just know eloise i did this for you. this is your fault. vindi-fucking-cation for creating girlboss adam kenyon. oh, and sorry to anyone who reads this and hates shakespeare, you can blame eloise for that too &lt;3</p><p>also, here is a playlist for this crime against humanity i spent too much time on this and not enough on writing the fuckin thing: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/11PzJA06m3PgaxqjpEeTdx</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p><strong>i</strong> </p><p>being your slave, what should i do but tend</p><p>upon the hours and times of your desire?</p><p>i have no precious time at all to spend,</p><p>nor services to do, till you require.</p><p>— sonnet 57, william shakespeare</p><p> </p><p>The kettle thunders before it begins to rattle and squeak, before it dies away and surrenders to solace, and in that tumultuous minute or so Fergus genuinely feels like his face is about to fucking melt off. There is something so wrong and unprecedented about this entire situation, a part of him that insists things are already far beyond repair. This, letting Adam into his kitchen and putting the fucking kettle on like they’re a pair of housewives about to have a natter, is equivalent to trying to piece back together an antique vase armed only with a pritt-stick, one of those shitty pritt-sticks that’s blue and marketed at kids.</p><p> </p><p>And maybe that’s an exaggeration, maybe this is an easily-resolved conflict for any two people who aren’t Adam and Fergus, but unfortunately that’s the whole fucking problem. The point. This was broken by cruelty and coldness, by a vast carelessness that spills out of a taxi and onto the pavement, into the porch, and that’s a carelessness that Fergus always knew Adam had the capacity for. He just didn’t think he’d ever bear the brunt of it.</p><p> </p><p>In hindsight, that was foolish. Adam is an objectively loathsome person, spineless, a fucking worm void of any real ideology other than maintaining and gaining power. His loyalty should have always been a point of concern for Fergus, and yet here they are now, and for whatever reason he feels like <em>he’s</em> the one that made this whole mess.</p><p> </p><p>“Kettle’s boiled,” Adam says, bringing Fergus back to the realm he‘s meant to be operating within right now, and as he crosses the kitchen to open up the cupboard where teabags resided three months ago, Fergus wishes he hadn’t. Something— and he won’t say what he thinks it is, because the last time he did that he ruined everything— twists in Fergus’ chest at the quiet, unimportant realisation that already Adam is out of place somewhere he used to know so intimately.</p><p> </p><p>He got one of those fucking tins, actually, just out of spite since Adam would slag him off every time he came around for keeping tea in the box in a cupboard. But Adam wouldn’t know that, because he hasn’t been here in three months. And the last time he was, he didn’t kick off his shoes and Fergus—</p><p> </p><p>Well.</p><p> </p><p>The problem starts a lot earlier than three months ago. Three months ago did feel like the end of everything, when Fergus had to spend a particularly unbearable evening watching Adam kiss up to Olly Reeder about the viable job offers he’d rejected five years prior for <em>him</em>. Which didn’t really work out, from a political lens. No, that’s too far down the line with too little information, because none of this would’ve even made Fergus seethe the way he did, make him feel so sour and bitter and rotten, if what happened almost three years prior, the day Malcolm Tucker resigned, had never fucking happened in the first place.</p><p> </p><p>And that feels cheap and half-hearted, that sounds like the wrong attitude to have— willing time-travel into existence— when Fergus has spent his whole political career accepting that when you fuck up you can’t just take it back. And if he’s being honest, he doesn’t mean it at all. Because kissing your best friend and having him kiss you back should be, all things considered, good. And Fergus guesses it was as it unfolded. They’d stayed too late at DoSAC, ironing out that minor fuck-up with the police backlogs, and headed back to Fergus’ house like they hadn’t just emerged from the apocalypse itself. Just another day, the world ending all over again with the sun rising and resetting.</p><p> </p><p>Fergus had almost entirely forgotten about half of what happened that day until he was leaning against the counter in his own kitchen, dimly lit, watching Adam make tea and only listening with one ear to him rant about the events of the day.</p><p> </p><p>There was something almost angelic about it, a sacred quality that can’t quite be matched. The unspoken way Adam knew where everything lived within the walls of Fergus’ home, how he performed this task of utmost domesticity like it was included in his job description. And all whilst he slagged off their coworker— or ex-coworker, Fergus thought with a faint stab of guilt— for almost assaulting him that afternoon.</p><p> </p><p>“I mean, seriously,” Adam had been foaming, “he just fucking lost it. I don’t know how he lasted as long as he fucking did because, like, if that’s all it takes for him to go fucking feral, shit, how he hasn’t murdered someone or—”</p><p> </p><p>Tuning back out again, Fergus couldn’t help but let his mind linger on Adam— Adam who is morally bankrupt and unabashed about it, Adam who seems to spout hatred and disgust for everything around him like people on laxatives expel shit— planting himself, unflinching, between Fergus and a disgruntled geriatric wielding a lamp in a manner that was honestly quite threatening.</p><p> </p><p>And that feeling bubbles up inside Fergus, paired with this baroque painting of Adam, his back turned as he pours milk into steaming mugs, yellowish light from the lamps in the street softening the darkness, and then every other love-letter memory is stacking up on the doormat thanks to an unrelenting postman; every phone call Adam has ever made to his mum when he didn’t really want to speak to her; every lunch bought in stealth, bestowed upon Fergus despite him having never made a request; every hand on a shoulder, placed on the small of the back, staying where it maybe shouldn’t for just a moment too long, every fucking demeaning fist-bump and half-hug over a game of squash; every sight of Adam in his fucking embarrassing shorts; Adam.</p><p> </p><p>They’re pressed shut with a perfect wax seal, and as Adam turns back to ask Fergus something, he rips it right off.</p><p> </p><p>Kissing Adam. Kissing Adam against the kitchen counter and having him kiss back. His hands are warm and on Fergus’ face and this is the point in the jigsaw that is coordinating physical affection that Fergus realises the puzzle pieces fell in place long before he even put thought into where they belonged. He’s placed his hands on Adam’s hips and can presume that’s how he pushed him back into the worktop. Or maybe Adam lead him back there. It wasn’t— this wasn’t a stilted and stiff moment, there was no apprehension or momentary tension, just two people meeting at a point where two lines cross, an ever-fixed mark that has been visible from miles away.</p><p> </p><p>Because Adam had placed a hand on the nape of Fergus’ neck with such an automatic quality, had leaned in closer and kissed him back with an earnestness that couldn’t go hand-in-hand with surprise. His breaths were quiet, and soft, warm, and Fergus could feel him smiling. And that was meant to happen. That was meant to happen.</p><p> </p><p>“Took you long enough,” Adam had remarked later.</p><p> </p><p>“Fuck off.”</p><p> </p><p>“What? You need the fucking character development.”</p><p> </p><p>And Fergus had said, “Very funny,” in the most scathing tone he could muster, but his own laughter seconds later betrayed him.</p><p> </p><p>Things were not different on a cosmic level after that. The world did not seem brighter, carrying doomsday home every evening from DoSAC Fergus did not find it lighter. If he’s being honest, the only extra time he and Adam spent together was the nights he’d stay over, which were neither a time-tabled affair nor infrequent. Long, early-morning hours spent lying on his side in the dark, dreaming up the next DoSAC shitshow in a sleepless haze, not— not comforted by Adam’s breath on the back of his neck, but there was something there. Something about Adam’s constant presence, leading him by his hand through everything. Not actually, but still. The things he did...</p><p> </p><p>To lie there, and stare at the crack between the curtains out into the cold and uncaring world, and feel Adam by his side, seeping with warmth, and know; he will be there. The world will keep on turning and everything will fall away and despite that, he will do what no one else can. He will stay. That was okay. That was more than okay, actually.</p><p> </p><p>Fergus remembers the first morning Adam tied his tie for him. Not just straightening it up before a press conference like he’d done a million times before, no, it was still a dark January morning outside and they were in Fergus’ bedroom. Adam, shirtless, his hair sticking up at an amusing angle, had come out of the en-suite, crossed the room faster by stepping over the actual bed with a certain smugness, and plucked Fergus’ tie from his hands before he began knotting it himself.</p><p> </p><p>“Adam,” Fergus had started, hands still hovering in front of his chest as Adam stepped closer than was necessary, “I can actually tie a fucking tie myself you know?”</p><p> </p><p>His brow was furrowed and his forearms brushed against Fergus’ hands as he pulled the tie through. “Yeah,” he said, matter-of-fact. Of course he knew Fergus could tie a tie. He’d never been here to do this before.</p><p> </p><p>But he was now, Fergus realised, as Adam pressed a quick kiss to his lips and busied himself once more with getting dressed. Where his hands had been on Fergus’ chest felt empty, almost.</p><p> </p><p>No one at DoSAC noticed anything. But, Fergus guesses there wasn’t anything to notice anyway. He walked through life as he always did, ate and slept normally, got in an hour earlier than Peter and left two later than him almost every day, and no one questioned the growing frequency with which Adam would arrive and depart with him. That was quite possibly the only shift in routine, because for years now Fergus had been pressing a pen into the side of Adam’s arm during their lunch break until he turned his head to smile at him, and for years Adam had been doing... everything, basically. He was good at his job, and Fergus knew he prided himself on that. He’d always been like that, when they first met and he was still working at the fucking Mail. He was persistent, maybe obsessive, but the word that Fergus liked to use was <em>attentive</em>.</p><p> </p><p>No, Adam was attentive to a degree that teeters the threshold between good at his job and— and—</p><p> </p><p>Dwelling on the inherent intimacy of acts of service was not something Fergus ever did, as a sort of act of service for Adam. Because for how fucking tactile and tender he could be, Adam looked like a deer caught in headlights any time you dared to put a word to his actions. A particularly irritable deer who made threats of graphic, physical violence that put his writing experience to good use.</p><p> </p><p>So instead, Fergus lets Adam cross the space between them in his bedroom each morning so he can tie his tie. Because they don’t really need to discuss whatever it is that they have. It’s good. It’s stable, and it’s healthy. The only grasping desperation Fergus ever really feels is the mornings when he wakes up alone, and that pang of anxiety fades after Adam comes in with coffee or steps out of the shower, always appearing from some errand if he isn’t joined at Fergus’ hip.</p><p> </p><p>The only dialogue they ever seem to have about it all is making sure Fergus keeps all his limbs firmly inside the closet. Which is Fergus’ choice. Not that Adam suggested he shouldn’t do that, but— well, he shouldn’t. They’ve had this conversation many times before, actually, because nothing was ever a big secret between the two of them. During their campaign for the last election, they lived together in the shittiest of one-bedroom flats and didn’t really have much room for skeletons in the closet, let alone anything else.</p><p> </p><p>And as the months pass, things become more lax. Adam has his own key. Fergus will come home from a day of slogging through shit, particularly shattered, and Adam will loosen his tie, kiss him gently, sit him down on the sofa and come in some time later with trays of food. And then they sit and eat together, and watch Glee and pretend to hate it, and in Fergus’ utter exhaustion he will lean against Adam and thank any god that may be out there that the body next to him does not tense in those moments.</p><p> </p><p>“You need to start going to bed earlier,” Adam says to him, one night, and Fergus scoffs. Adam has always made a big deal about sleep schedules, and every fucking time that Fergus says he doesn’t need one Adam brings up the fact that a sleep schedule is the sole thing that prevented him from going insane working nights at the Mail.</p><p> </p><p>“Fuck off.”</p><p> </p><p>“No, I’m fucking serious, you look like—” shifting for a brief period out of Fergus’ embrace, Adam presses a finger into his chest— “like a week-old party balloon, or a fucking— a twat who spends too much of his time stressing about work.”</p><p> </p><p>The air feels so cold and unwelcoming, so Fergus reaches across the small space between himself and Adam to close it once more. “How irrational of me,” he says, “since I have the least stressful job in existence.”</p><p> </p><p>“Yeah, but that’s my job. To stress about your fuck-ups for you.”</p><p> </p><p>“It’s really not,” Fergus pointed out, but his heart wasn’t really in it. Adam’s breath was warm on his face, a constant and light presence in that moment, that moment where he just smirked at Fergus like he’d told the funniest joke on this earth. Like he’d whispered some glorious and incoherent inside-joke in his ear and knew no one would ever be able to share that with them. The count of crinkles in the corners of his eyes, the glimmer of toothy white showing, they screamed that secrecy and intimacy louder than anything else, than the world can contain. So then Fergus kissed him.</p><p> </p><p>•</p><p> </p><p>It’s strange. Because Adam and Fergus are so accustomed to a level of conversation utterly belittling and sarcastic, void of anything profound, it always seems off when they do break that rule. When they, two people who are so integrated in one another’s lives, breach the topic of anything real. So Fergus always tries to avoid it altogether, not really out of his own desire but rather a consideration for Adam’s, a consideration that Adam neither seems to notice nor appreciate. In fact, it is always him that breaks that unspoken rule, always him to first touch something so untouchable.</p><p> </p><p>“Do you remember my last girlfriend?” Adam says, one night, his head resting on Fergus’ chest as they lie in bed.</p><p> </p><p>“What, the— the one from the Telegraph?”</p><p> </p><p>“No, like <em>proper</em> girlfriend. The one I broke up with before the election.”</p><p> </p><p>“Oh.” Fergus does remember her. She was nice. Always smiling, but not in an insufferable way. She was pleasant to be around, and coming from Fergus who hates everyone apart from Adam and has never really been fond of the people he keeps company with, that’s a big deal. Adam had broken up with her, just before they started Fergus’ election campaign actually. “Yeah. Why?”</p><p> </p><p>Adam shrugs. “She’s getting married.”</p><p> </p><p>“Seriously?”</p><p> </p><p>“Yeah,” he says, “Angela told me.” He doesn’t sound upset, nor particularly happy. Fergus isn’t really sure what territory this conversation is beginning to encroach on but it feels an awful lot like a minefield. “She was way too fucking nice.”</p><p> </p><p>“Are you gonna go?” Fergus asks, and then adds, “I mean, are you invited?”</p><p> </p><p>There’s a small sound from Adam, somewhere between a glottal stop and a stifled sob. “No. We haven’t spoken in years and like— I mean you met her, she was like a fucking saint. Fucking— never got mad at me.”</p><p> </p><p>“Wait, some people can actually tolerate you?” Fergus jokes, but his hand is stays firm on the small of Adam’s back.</p><p> </p><p>“Yeah well she— she did. For like a whole year, and then she <em>dared</em> to ask something of me and I just told her to fuck off.”</p><p> </p><p>“What?”</p><p> </p><p>“She wanted me to, like, move in with her,” Adam says, nonchalant enough to maybe come across as unbothered. Maybe. To someone that isn’t Fergus. “Or whatever. We barely spent any time together because— because <em>work</em>, and I just... I dunno. And now she’s, like, <em>happy</em>,” he speaks that word into existence like it tastes bad, “and getting married and— and doing things normal people our age do.”</p><p> </p><p>Stroking Adam’s hair like it’s an instinct, Fergus feels his mouth go very dry. “Do you— miss her?”</p><p> </p><p>“Fuck no,” Adam says, shifting suddenly onto his side and out of Fergus’ reach. “I just— I’m a piece of shit, that’s all.”</p><p> </p><p>“Literally everyone is already aware of that.”</p><p> </p><p>“I know.”</p><p> </p><p>But there’s something about Adam, an uneasiness to him, that tells Fergus he has more to say. More that he will never say, because Adam doesn’t really talk about his emotions beyond sarcastic comments and jokes. Fergus thinks about his ex, and her unwavering kindness, her polite nature, all these things that Adam loves to mock in people, and he remembers a feeling that used to curl up in the bottom of his stomach whenever he saw them together. Something about her, this perfect fucking person, being exempt from Adam’s scorn. His hatred for everyone.</p><p> </p><p>It’s a miracle she didn’t break up with him, considering everything.</p><p> </p><p>•</p><p> </p><p>A year and a half passes. Just about. Over the winter holiday, somehow, Fergus winds up taking Adam back to his mum’s for Christmas. Something about not wanting to spend it with his sister and her husband paired with the pressure Fergus feels for no real reason around his mum to— to be more than he is. Which doesn’t make much sense, because Fergus was and still is someone overly-mothered. She doesn’t care that she hasn’t met a boyfriend since Fergus was twenty two, but Fergus does.</p><p> </p><p>Not that Adam is a boyfriend. Because he isn’t. They’re just in agreement that they will pretend for Fergus’ mum, because it’s not much pretending to begin with and it’s utterly harmless. And, Fergus realises, as they’re driving up to Hertfordshire on the twenty-first, he wants to spend this time with Adam anyway. He <em>likes</em> spending time with him, likes his presence. Fergus would go looking for Adam if he wasn’t there. Of course he would. He doesn’t know how to live without him, forgets about regular mealtimes when he’s not there, fucks up his sleep schedule, whatever.</p><p> </p><p>Obviously neither of them have mentioned this to anyone. Fergus is already convinced that all of DoSAC knows he’s gay and even though they have nothing and could find nothing to prove that claim, he could really do without further speculation and leading questions in the workplace. He’s genuinely had nightmares about the whole ordeal of if it got out, which always seem to end with Terri being the last to find out and then acting very, very surprised, whilst Peter blathers vague incoherencies about how he thinks gays are very well turned out and Phil mentions fucking Kirk and Spock.</p><p> </p><p>They all know. They all already know, it’s just that Fergus has been scrupulous in ensuring there’s no physical evidence anyone could ever use to out him. So they might all know, but they can’t do shit about it. And frankly, Fergus can live with that.</p><p> </p><p>“Stop worrying,” Adam says, perceptive to a level that is annoying as usual. Fergus’ grip on the wheel tightens.</p><p> </p><p>“I’m not worried.”</p><p> </p><p>“I don’t know why you get like this with your mum.”</p><p> </p><p>Fergus bites his lip. “She’s just— you know, she—”</p><p> </p><p>“No.”</p><p> </p><p>The dryness of Adam’s response makes Fergus flare up in a panic. “Okay, well— I mean, I know you don’t know but I just meant that—”</p><p> </p><p>But Adam is laughing, soft and easy and anything but upset. “Christ, Ferg,” he says. “It’s fine. Okay? I get it that you find your mum fucking terrifying for whatever Freudian reason—”</p><p> </p><p>“Fuck off,” Fergus retorts, only he’s grinning now. Adam has done it again. He always does it.</p><p> </p><p>“Just stop worrying. Okay? Your mum’s fine.”</p><p> </p><p>“You just think that because she likes you.”</p><p> </p><p>Often, out of habit, Fergus will fob his mother’s phone calls off onto Adam, which has resulted in them becoming quite close. But Fergus thinks that’s good. He certainly thinks it’s good for Adam.</p><p> </p><p>“Well—” in the seat next to him, Fergus feels Adam’s shoulders tense up— “you could have worse. You know, it’s fucking— I genuinely cannot fathom how my sister ended up marrying someone so snivelling and pathetic and— and— like, did she just forget what shitty people are like?”</p><p> </p><p>“Yeah.”</p><p> </p><p>“He’s a <em>prick</em>.”</p><p> </p><p>“Yeah.”</p><p> </p><p>Catching himself, Adam turns his head and eyes Fergus for a moment with a certain uneasiness before shaking his head. “Sorry, I just—”</p><p> </p><p>“No,” Fergus says, “no, no, I get it. I get— it’s fine.”</p><p> </p><p>And then Adam tilts his head slightly and there’s a very small and very stupid smile on his face, and he says, “You’re still worrying.”</p><p> </p><p>“I’m not.”</p><p> </p><p>“You’re smiling,” he points out, crooning it, smug in the way that, years ago, Fergus would’ve found a lot more insufferable than he does now.</p><p> </p><p>“So?”</p><p> </p><p>“You always do that when you lie.”</p><p> </p><p>Fergus’ mum still lives in the house he grew up in, which is a rather mortifying fact when he’s in the knowledge that she’ll be showing Adam every inch of it, pointing out every fucking table corner he walked into as a child, turning all of the little pencil-marking height measurements on the wall in the utility room into a spectacle. It’s also large, and proper, and makes Fergus feel far too conscious of his status as someone who comes from a family of, as Glenn might’ve once put it, six-toed pony-fuckers. He can pretend to oppose it all he wants but Fergus’ background is quintessentially British and elitist and Oxbridge, even if his mum says she likes Dan Miller’s fucking tweets and lectures him on the spinelessness of centrist politics all the time.</p><p> </p><p>Cecilia Williams is one of those women who got into natural dyeing and vegetarianism in the eighties because she had vast wealth and wanted to seem ‘hip’. Nowadays, she’s not that different, but she is a bit less keen on the natural dyeing and has instead recently adopted wool spinning as her craft as choice. She has a wheel and everything. Fergus keeps buying her little tools he fails to understand the purpose of because she keeps sending him links to all of them. Since his dad died, it’s just been her in that big house with the dogs, two border collies that dwarf her and yet somehow don’t wear her out on their marathon-length walks up behind the fields and into the woods.</p><p> </p><p>Before the car is even halfway into the drive, she’s out of the front door with the dogs bounding up ahead of her, and Fergus finds himself biting back an age-old concern that flares up around his mum, his mum who is still so convinced she’s immortal like kids are, and yet his mum whose excitable dogs are almost as big as her and his mum who has a fucking heart problem.</p><p> </p><p>People have always said Fergus looks the spitting image of his mum which, honestly, he finds a bit offensive. Because she’s a woman of five feet and three inches, and Fergus is neither of those things, but everyone insists they have the same face shape, the same smile, same freckles, and it’s her genes that cursed him to be ginger. But she’s far too kind, and seems to wear exclusively woollen and handmade clothing, and, Fergus would like to point out again, five foot fucking three.</p><p> </p><p>“Hello love,” she’s saying to him, as he gets out of the car and is affronted with her hands on his shoulders and a kiss to both of his cheeks, her entire maternal ritual that is also carried out for Adam. And then she’s asking how they are, and how the drive was, and how <em>work</em> is, and she asks after their colleagues and makes a face when she utters each of their names because she knows in great detail how much they hate them. She’s this frenzy of small talk that old people seem to manifest as when they get visitors who aren’t their own age.</p><p> </p><p>“I finished this one about a week ago,” she explains, holding out the corner of her newest sweater, which is flecked with various shades of blue. “I got the fibre from this <em>lovely</em> lady based in Aberdeen, and she sent it down to me and I spun it myself on the wheel and then I crocheted this pattern because, actually, I’ve been wanting to use this pattern for years. It was from— Fergie, you remember that book you bought me three Christmases ago? The one by the nice man who makes all the shawls especially? Yes, it was from that book and I think it’s turned out just wonderfully.”</p><p> </p><p>And, of course, she continues to talk like this for the next hour, providing a running commentary on the fact that the neighbours’ cat died recently as they unload the car, making vague and snide comments about the government whilst tea brews in the kitchen, noting how her amaryllis is a bit limp when they enter the living room and <em>then</em> launching into another rant about how she doesn’t like the local garden centre anymore.</p><p> </p><p>It’s like this with Fergus’ mum. She’s one of those people who talks in a loud voice, as if she’s worried people won’t hear her otherwise, and that’s probably because of the kind of man her husband was. And sure, both of his parents came from distantly aristocratic families, but his dad was the stiff-upper-lip, Southern, conservative type who didn’t know how to cook or iron, and had this foolish idea that Fergus wouldn’t either, and his mum... well, she was just very different. And in a very unhappy marriage for reasons Fergus still doesn’t understand, since his parents loved to lie to him as a child and his mother still views him as exactly that. It’s not— Fergus won’t pretend that he had a particularly complex or troubled family because he doesn’t, because everyone has one or two parental grievances, and some have more than their fair share.</p><p> </p><p>To be honest, his life is rather contrived, pulled directly from some sort of rich kid sob story. Point being, it’s not a sob story. It’s a nothingness. Fergus is supposed to be okay with the nothingness of every aspect of his life, the nothingness of being overly-mothered, the nothingness of a sheltered upbringing, the nothingness of being closeted and the nothingness of his career and the nothingness— the <em>nothingness</em>. Fergus is entitled, and that makes him insecure. He will not ask for anything out of fear of being obtrusive, even if his request is for someone to stop giving.</p><p> </p><p>On the second day of their stay, the evening and aftermath of dinner in which Fergus begins clearing away used dishes and plates into the kitchen, his mother makes a comment that should’ve been so throwaway. Shouldn’t have snowballed into what it did.</p><p> </p><p>“You really are so much better than your father, love.”</p><p> </p><p>Fergus has to smile at this, of course, and pretend that he doesn’t find it exhausting to be compared with that man forevermore. He’s stacking plates in this neat and prim fashion he would file paperwork with, as he says, “It’s nothing Mum.”</p><p> </p><p>And Cecilia, so pleased to hear exactly what she wants, places her hand over Adam’s and does that thing where she talks to him like Fergus isn’t there. “He is good, isn’t he?” Her ‘s’ sounds are unusually slithery for her standards. “So courteous. Nothing like his father, I don’t think he even knew we <em>had</em> a dishwasher.”</p><p> </p><p>“He thought it was you, Mum,” Fergus jokes, in an attempt to remind her he is in fact here still. Adam is smirking at him, because he finds all of this so funny. Of course he does. The embarrassing triviality of Fergus’ family is something Adam has always been fascinated by.</p><p> </p><p>“Yes,” her short, curt laugh is a genuine one, at least, “well, he would’ve never let you do the washing up anyway.” And then she furrows her brow and puts on this deep, hollow voice: “It’s a woman’s job.”</p><p> </p><p>It’s only as Fergus is carrying the various spoils of tea out into the kitchen that Adam says something. And he says it to his mum in that same way she addresses him; like Fergus isn’t even there.</p><p> </p><p>“Not to shatter your perception of him or anything, Cecilia, but he doesn’t even wash up at home.”</p><p> </p><p>“Oh you’re— really?”</p><p> </p><p>Adam is grinning, because he thinks this is all a big joke. And, to be fair, Fergus notes his mother’s face as one he recognises, the one she wears when she knows she should be disappointed in him but doesn’t really have the heart to be. And Fergus thinks he knows why she’s wearing that face right now, because in any other context she would probably be scolding him for his performative acts of service, and then extend that to a wider lecture about performing within politics, and then—</p><p> </p><p>She’s not doing that. She’s shaking her head and squeezing Adam’s hand and saying to him, “You are good to him. Not that he deserves it.” And Fergus seems to be stuck in place, in the little archway between the kitchen and dining room. He has tripped over one little word, except it’s not a little word, it is fucking colossal and he cannot squeeze past it however hard he tries. He’s in the kitchen and he places the plates in the sink, and they clatter together and that word— that one fucking word— sticks between his ribs and makes a— God, it makes a fucking home in his heart.</p><p> </p><p><em>Home</em>.</p><p> </p><p>Because Adam and Fergus are pretending. They’re pretending, but they still made out on Fergus’ sofa the other night of their own volition. They’re pretending, but Adam still came all this way when he really didn’t have to, when there was no real need for Fergus to bring someone home nor for Adam to avoid his sister, they’re pretending but Adam still just referred to Fergus’ house as <em>home</em>. And he didn’t sound like he was pretending then, because just like Adam knows Fergus smiles when he lies, Fergus knows the clip of Adam’s tone when he says something he doesn’t really mean, and he often recognises it because Adam only uses it to clue him in on his own sarcasm.</p><p> </p><p>Fuzzy. That’s how Fergus’ mind feels right now, like those fucking fibres his mum spins into yarn. He walks back into the dining room to his mother and Adam making jokes at his own expense, and it feels all too real. Home. Here he is in his childhood home and he’s lying to his mother who lies to him, and he’s supposedly come here with his current boyfriend from his current home.</p><p> </p><p>“Adam,” he says, standing at the far end of the table, “can you— give me a hand?”</p><p> </p><p>Rolling his eyes, Adam gets out of his seat and says, “Of course, sweetheart,” but this time the clip is there and it makes Fergus want to punch him. Or kiss him.</p><p> </p><p>He tells his mum to go pop on the TV, and promises to bring her a cup of tea when they’re done, and once she’s disappeared into the other room and he can hear the blaring sound of Countryfile, Fergus turns to Adam.</p><p> </p><p>“What the fuck is wrong with you?”</p><p> </p><p>This awful smile that Fergus loves is growing on Adam’s face. “What?” he asks, feigning innocence. His arms are crossed across his chest. </p><p> </p><p>“It’s— it’s like you can read my mum’s fucking mind and will just say whatever she wants to hear. Like,” and Fergus laughs because he can’t quite believe this fact, “she likes you. She loves you.”</p><p> </p><p>“That’s because I’m a fucking delight,” Adam says.</p><p> </p><p>Fergus realises he wants to say something about it all. About ‘home’. His heart is thudding inside his chest as he and Adam stack the dishwasher together, as Adam forces him to scrub down the roasting tray as an act of vindication. He tries the indirect, “My mum’s never liked anyone as much as you,” first, which only elicits a snort from Adam.</p><p> </p><p>“I thought she’d only met, like, one guy from university? The fucking— the drama wanker. The one you told me about.”</p><p> </p><p>“Yeah—” for a moment, Fergus ceases scrubbing to contemplate Adam’s choice of ‘one guy’ instead of ‘boyfriend’— “but still. You’re probably objectively worse.”</p><p> </p><p>Adam makes a face. “Maybe morally. Like, what else does she want for her darling boy beyond someone considerate, and attentive, and— I dunno. I’m— I’m good, actually.”</p><p> </p><p>“You think you’re considerate and attentive?” Fergus asks him, grinning over his shoulder at him. Narrowing his eyes, Adam otherwise mirrors his expression.</p><p> </p><p>“For you? Yeah.” And then he adds, “Not for anyone else. Christ.”</p><p> </p><p>The urge to ask him is growing even more now, spiralling out of control like some invasive species of plant his mum would spray with weed killer or whatever. It is this great, lead weight on Fergus’ tongue, and if he doesn’t let it go then he’ll fucking die or something. Something. This shouldn’t be as important as it is. It’s one word, and this whole thing is a big show anyway.</p><p> </p><p>What isn’t a big show is the way that, as Fergus thinks and cleans, Adam steps closer to him and presses his forefinger on the furrowed space between his eyebrows. He looks so fucking smarmy as well. Fergus has never wanted to kill anyone more.</p><p> </p><p>“You look stressed.”</p><p> </p><p>“I’m not stressed.”</p><p> </p><p>But Adam presses harder, in some attempt to smooth everything down. “Sure.”</p><p> </p><p>“Oh, fuck off,” Fergus says, breathy and half-laughed, and then Adam leans in and kisses him. And maybe, if Fergus wasn’t quite so conflicted about it, he’d find it funny that as Adam is kissing him against the countertop, he’s wondering if he really considers his house home. He’d find it funny that he is picking apart the semantics of Adam’s words whilst his hands are on his waist. He’d find it funny that, as Adam sticks his tongue down his throat, Fergus is wondering if he means any of it at all.</p><p> </p><p>A few minutes later, Fergus is bringing his mum a cup of tea whilst Adam finishes wiping down the kitchen. He sets it down on the coffee table in front of her and hopes she won’t stop him for one of her little chats, but he isn’t quite so lucky this evening.</p><p> </p><p>“Fergie,” she says, which annoys him outright because he isn’t five anymore, “I just wanted to say— you remember your father never helped around the house?”</p><p> </p><p>Stifling a sigh, Fergus shoves his hands into his pockets and nods. “Yes Mum.”</p><p> </p><p>Of course he remembers. Sitting across the room from him right now is the armchair his dad practically lived in, a chair that has gone untouched for years now. On the fucking mantle are three urns containing ashes of family dogs of the past, and yet his father’s is stored in the attic, in a cardboard box with sellotape keeping it shut. His presence as a poor person is everywhere in this house, and that’s something that Fergus hates. The thought that this is someone he is supposed to be like, someone he has to try his hardest to escape the long, wide shadow of.</p><p> </p><p>Fergus is not entitled. Fergus doesn’t want anything more than his desk and his office and his— and Adam.</p><p> </p><p>“One day, I finally asked if he could help me clear up after tea,” she says, quiet all of a sudden. Soft. “He said no, and I got quite miffed, actually. Because I’d finally plucked up the courage to ask one simple thing of him, one favour in return for all the things I did for him, and he just dismissed me, acted like it was ridiculous for couples to help one another. But, and this was the funny part—” her laugh indicates that it is, in fact, actually funny— “he said he’d never offered me help in the past because he thought I wanted to do it all on my own. He thought I’d be brave enough to ask that lazy pig of a man for help, when he sat around all day insisting that housework isn’t <em>for</em> men.”</p><p> </p><p>“Right.”</p><p> </p><p>She’s shaking her head now, and raising her mug to her dainty mouth. “You can’t expect people to always speak their mind, Fergie. They’re scared, a lot of the time. And I think what your father didn’t quite grasp is people can fear losing things. People who aren’t from the same world as him.”</p><p> </p><p>“Yeah,” Fergus says, though he isn’t sure he understands why his mum is saying this. He thinks it might just be one of her little rants, her tearful reflections on her marriage. That persistent problem that no one seems to regard highly. Fergus thinks of his parents, and he thinks of Adam’s sister and her husband, Peter on the phone to his wife every other morning, mentions of Terri’s husband few and far between. He thinks about Glenn Cullen, divorced and with only his sister to turn to provided he whitewash her walls.</p><p> </p><p>That night, Fergus falls asleep with Adam’s breath on the nape of his neck, and each of his hairs stand on end in a sensation that makes him feel awfully young again. Nostalgic for the person that slept in this room, what, twenty-eight years ago? It’s very different to how it was then, repainted to suit Cecilia’s tastes and also rid the walls of those little blu-tac stains.</p><p> </p><p>He wonders if people who get married have ever loved one another. He wonders what quantifies marriage. He wonders, most presently, how two people decide to make a home together. If it’s even something you do consciously, or rather a process that creeps up on you and unfolds before you’ve even realised it.</p><p> </p><p>Is it as direct as popping the question to someone, or can it just be the amassing collection of Adam’s clothes in Fergus’ wardrobe amongst his own?</p><p> </p><p>This easily-resolved conflict, the one that ends years later with Adam standing in Fergus’ kitchen and not knowing where the tea is kept anymore, it reaches a turning point on Christmas Day that year. Because Adam drinks too much in the evening, and when they finally go to bed and Fergus lets his bedroom door click shut behind him, something awful and unclear and utterly incomprehensible happens. There is a dialogue. A real one. As real as anything can ever <em>get</em> for Adam and Fergus.</p><p> </p><p>“You’re so— like, archetypal,” Adam says, lying back on the bed and watching as Fergus changes.</p><p> </p><p>“What the fuck does that mean?”</p><p> </p><p>His fingers are fumbling with the buttons of his shirt, and he’s not really sure why.</p><p> </p><p>Adam shrugs. “You’re just like— like, I don’t know. You make sense.”</p><p> </p><p>“Thanks?”</p><p> </p><p>“Like of course you do what you do. Of course you’re like what you’re like. Of course your mum’s like that.”</p><p> </p><p>And now there’s a nervousness to Fergus’ laugh. “Is there a point you’re trying to make or are you just calling me bland and uninteresting?”</p><p> </p><p>“I just—” sitting up a little suddenly, Adam runs a hand through his hair— “like it’s nice. And your mum is nice and your life is so fucking <em>nice</em>,” he says, a slight waver creeping into his voice. “It makes sense. It all fits together.”</p><p> </p><p>Fergus doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t know what he’s supposed to say.</p><p> </p><p>“You never— you never feel out of place. Like, this is what you’re supposed to do. It’s what everyone expected you to do. And you just got it. And you’re fucking perfect at it.”</p><p> </p><p>“Well—”</p><p> </p><p>“No, but like— it’s fucking better than when you were fucking,” Adam makes a garbled noise of exasperation, “doing press at Npower. Like, why the fuck were you doing that? You didn’t have to. And you just left it like— like it didn’t even matter to you. It wasn’t scary, to just leave your job and go into politics.”</p><p> </p><p>Crawling over into bed now, Fergus wordlessly places his hands over Adam’s chest and then begins to undo his shirt.</p><p> </p><p>“Ferg.”</p><p> </p><p>“Yeah.”</p><p> </p><p>“You’re mad at me,” Adam says, and he’s wrong. He couldn’t be further from the truth actually, but he says it with such a certainty. A drunk, slightly slurred certainty. “God—” and then he’s covering his face with his hands— “your mum must fucking hate me.”</p><p> </p><p>“What?” Halting his unbuttoning, Fergus frowns at him. “No, Adam, she— are you okay?”</p><p> </p><p>His hands are now taking Fergus’, removing them from his half-undone shirt with such care and gentleness, bringing them up to his face to cradle it. Fergus isn’t sure if his hands are what’s so fucking cold or if it’s Adam’s cheeks, but he does know that his heart is fucking dropping past his stomach as Adam leans into this self-conceived touch and stares up at him with— with some look that is far too intimate, sickeningly intimate. His face is flushed and his eyes are wide and it’s— it’s all too much for Fergus, Fergus sitting before him and just trying to perform a single task.</p><p> </p><p>“You worry too much,” he murmurs, low and languid and like his movements, the way he slowly tilts his head into the curve of Fergus’ palm and kisses his fingers.</p><p> </p><p>“Right, because you never give me anything to worry about.”</p><p> </p><p>Adam frowns. “Why— why the fuck would you—”</p><p> </p><p>But he doesn’t even finish his own utterance, rather just lets it hang incomplete and unfulfilled in the air for a moment. And then Fergus is, with great caution, easing him back into bed and insisting he’s tired, that they need to sleep, because he doesn’t really want to talk anymore. Adam grasps at Fergus’ pinky finger.</p><p> </p><p>“Do you wanna know what Angela asked me, the other day?”</p><p> </p><p>Fergus sighs. “What?”</p><p> </p><p>“She,” Adam laughs, light and small and still distinctly wicked, “she asked if we were shagging. Which was fucking rich coming from her, because she— like, I don’t think she’s ever been with anyone vaguely tolerable. She went out with fucking Olly Reeder, for fuck’s sake.”</p><p> </p><p>Fergus nods and listens to Adam go on his spiel about Angela Heaney and all the dirt he has on her, and tries not to think about the bigger picture. Because, many times before Adam has assured Fergus that he and Angela are actually friends, or people that tolerate one another, or have some functional bond that means neither of them would fuck the other over. He’s just— there’s this awful squeezing sensation in his chest that reminds him of those nightmares— the ones at DoSAC with all his caricature coworkers— and it compels him to cut Adam off mid-explanation in some anecdote from the Daily Mail night desk.</p><p> </p><p>“What did you tell her?”</p><p> </p><p>“What?”</p><p> </p><p>“When she asked,” Fergus clarifies. “The other day.”</p><p> </p><p>Adam shrugs. “I told her to fuck off.”</p><p> </p><p>And Fergus doesn’t really believe that, but when Adam lies to him like this there’s no way he can actually find out the truth. So he just has to lie there, and spoon Adam on this rare occasion, as he holds his hands and continues to talk about something. Someone. Some story from a past Adam insists almost killed him, some figure from a place he doesn’t ever want to return to. Fergus doesn’t know. Here he is, and he just doesn’t know enough of Adam to understand this yet. He wants to. He really wants to, but it’s what Adam says, the last thing he says on the verge of sleep, that makes Fergus think he’ll never get to know him.</p><p> </p><p>“I can’t believe there’s another person in your life you might actually consider a friend,” Fergus jokes, and he thinks it’ll make Adam laugh. Hopes. Because there has been this strange sort of fruit stone made of sadness inside Adam tonight, and he wants to shuck that from his flesh.</p><p> </p><p>Adam makes a soft noise, and his grip around Fergus’ hand tightens. And then, in an inaudible voice, he asks, “Another?”</p><p> </p><p>And that’s the tipping point, really. That’s when the scales begin to slide, except they cannot seem to make their mind up, are in constant flux. There are two interpretations here; Fergus is more than a friend, or he isn’t one at all.</p><p> </p><p>It should be easy. He should know the answer.</p><p> </p><p>Instead, he leaves both tick-boxes blank, and snaps the pen in half, and resolves to forget about the whole thing. Forget about one irrelevant comment Adam makes while drunk. Throw away the entire conversation while they’re at it, refuse to retain anything from this holiday other than his mum, and Adam saying <em>home</em>, and the walk they take the dogs for on Boxing Day morning, before they make their post-lunch leave.</p><p> </p><p>Cecilia makes a big deal out of their goodbyes because of course she does. She doesn’t care if Fergus brings someone home with him, but when he does she seems to get a bit sentimental. It’s all kisses and constricting hugs and a nag about ringing her, one last motherly jab, one more snide comment.</p><p> </p><p>“Drive safe,” she says, and Fergus assures her once more that they will not, in fact, crash the car and fucking die on the way home. And then she says to Adam, “Make sure he rings me,” and Adam makes some little quip that prompts a laugh from her, and it makes Fergus feel unusually sour.</p><p> </p><p>But he resolved not to think about that, anyway.</p><p> </p><p>And he doesn’t think about it, really. There isn’t a single part of Fergus’ body festering with the want to know, to have a distinction drawn between those two very different meanings. He doesn’t lie awake at night and stare at the ceiling, with Adam lying next to him, and wonder with an intensity unlike anything else if he means anything to him at all. Not once does Fergus reflect upon the way Adam interacts with him and try to figure out the true intent behind it all.</p><p> </p><p>Work is work. It’s the same as it always is, it’s the strangest combination of being in the reserve team for Ipswich Town and also being caught up in a typhoon of shit and piss and blood. Constituency affairs are quiet and easy in comparison, as they tend to be, and the next six months pass like nothing. Because nothing really is happening. Fergus’ life seems to have become this terrible stalemate, this awkward non-power in government and this awkward non-relationship with Adam and—</p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>ii</strong>
</p><p>let’s admit, without apology, what we do to each other.</p><p>we know who our enemies are. we know.</p><p>— detail of the fire, richard siken</p><p> </p><p>It’s summer, and it’s been two years since the inquiry from hell, and Adam sits opposite Fergus in his garden one evening, and they drink and make shitty jokes, and the neighbour’s cat stalks over the fence and Adam makes some remark about how he hates cats, and Fergus says he doesn’t mind them, and then Adam says that’s just because his mum is incapable of being in a house without a dog and he’s sick of them now, and Fergus tells him to shut the fuck up and then they end up kissing.</p><p> </p><p>Adam tying Fergus’ tie every morning, Adam referring to Fergus’ house as <em>home</em>, Adam planting that seed of doubt in his head with a single, drunken word. It’s all— it’s not really anything. And sure, Fergus doesn’t mind this. He doesn’t mind the way he always smiles into Adam’s kisses, doesn’t mind the small touches and soft looks and fond comments. What he minds is that it’s lacking something. It doesn’t fulfil him like it should, doesn’t make him feel like he did the first time, the very first time all of <em>that</em> exploded and unloaded and he dared to touch Adam. Because before this, long before all of this, Adam Kenyon was fucking untouchable, unfuckable, unseeable.</p><p> </p><p>People often assume they met in uni actually, and Fergus gets why. They didn’t. Fergus was in this awful circle of closeted Oxford twats at university, and Adam doesn’t talk very much about those years of his life beyond— well, Fergus thinks he’s pieced together two girlfriends, a boyfriend between them and, despite all the parties and drugs and drinking, a lot of unnecessary dedication to studies.</p><p> </p><p>No, Adam and Fergus met seven years ago because Adam was being his charmless, soulless self, pursuing a story for the Mail that really didn’t need to be pursued, and that story happened to be one about Npower.</p><p> </p><p>It was strange, because they managed to develop some semblance of a friendship once Adam finally realised he was beating a dead horse, and then a little while after that they started playing squash together. Fergus thinks it was about a year before they were proper mates, though he hates that phrase, and that’s when he began talking about getting into politics and ended up asking Adam to work for him. Which went poorly at first, because this is the whole point; Adam was always on his own, out of choice, for whatever fucking reason. He was cold, and seemed to avoid his current girlfriend as much as humanly possible, and when Fergus asked him to work for him he threw a shoe at him because he didn’t want to work for someone else and waste everything he’d already obtained.</p><p> </p><p>Later, Fergus would realise this was for reasons more complex than just not liking him. Because, Adam did like Fergus. And everyone who knew Adam would always inform him of how weird it was, to see them together and interacting with one another in a way Adam just <em>wasn’t</em>. He didn’t like to rely on other people for stuff, didn’t like to entrust them with pieces of himself, didn’t believe anyone would look out for him the way he did himself. Something family related. And then, without any real warning, he just quit his job for Fergus and decided to make something out of him. It was like a switch had been flipped in his brain, and he went from this heartless fucking monster of a hack, entirely self-serving and against the idea of collaboration in any capacity, to someone willing to do anything for Fergus, fucking kill someone <em>and</em> die for him if it secured him a seat in parliament.</p><p> </p><p>As of late, Adam’s dedication to the job has manifested as very long, very tedious arguments with Terri about very small, very short affairs that she just doesn’t want to do because then she’d have to lift a finger. One Friday afternoon, he retreats back to Fergus’ office with the usual lack of success and, muttering some expletive, Fergus watches how his shoulders sag when he sits down, and the hard line between his eyebrows that is then obscured by his hands.</p><p> </p><p>“... How did it go?”</p><p> </p><p>There’s a disgruntled noise from Adam.</p><p> </p><p>“Oh, so that well then?” Fergus is trying to make him laugh but it isn’t fucking working. Half his jokes are recycled from Adam anyway.</p><p> </p><p>“I literally,” Adam starts, but he can’t even finish whatever half-baked thought he wanted to share. Instead, he shakes his head and says, “I’m so tired.”</p><p> </p><p>And Fergus sits there, and wonders what he could possibly do to make this seem less shit. To give anything in their lives a real purpose, or motion, or— fucking anything. “Maybe we need to get a fucking— like, Mannion face masks and trick her into actually doing something for once.”</p><p> </p><p>And, at last, Adam laughs, faint but not out of obligation. He’s smiling. “But she doesn’t even— like, all she does is fucking proposition him, she doesn’t do her job.”</p><p> </p><p>“Yeah,” Fergus says, and contemplates that for a moment longer with a growing disgust. “Christ, no, okay, that’s—”</p><p> </p><p>Cackling, Adam cuts him off. “Yeah, imagine Terri making eyes at you in your fucking Peter Mannion cosplay.” He’s smirking, and making eyes at <em>Fergus</em>, and Fergus doesn’t really care that he’s being a dick because he doesn’t look miserable, like he could crumble to pieces at any moment and be blown away in the wind. </p><p> </p><p>“Very fucking funny.”</p><p> </p><p>“<em>I</em> think it’s funny.”</p><p> </p><p>The smile that spreads across Fergus’ face is unbearably fond. “Perhaps we should just go back to the original plot to kill her.”</p><p> </p><p>“As long as you frame Phil for it.”</p><p> </p><p>And they go home that evening, reenacting a Friday afternoon routine that feels far too domestic. It’s September, the awkward and uncomfortable weather in which you don’t really want to go out without a coat, but if you do you’ll be too warm, and they order a takeaway and eat it in the garden even if it’s mild, but before and after that quiet meal Fergus is subjected to the strange affair of watching Adam know where everything in his kitchen is.</p><p> </p><p>There’s a slight breeze, a susurrus in the leaves, and as the sun begins to disappear and the sky turns from yellow to orange to pink it almost seems warmer. Adam has been talking about something for the past few minutes and, with a certain shame, Fergus realises he hasn’t been listening. He’s been idle, watching, thinking.</p><p> </p><p>Something about all of this is horribly wrong. And it sits inside of Fergus and sinks like— like— he doesn’t even know. It’s like a peach, a round and ripe peach that you might take in a picnic, and you’ve wrapped it up in kitchen roll both to protect it and soak up the juice that will spurt everywhere when you bite into it. And it’s sticky, and sweet, the kind of thing ants will swarm in little marching lines, and it makes you feel sick. Makes your mouth go dry and begin to tingle, as though those ants are now marching down your throat, and you drop the peach and it rolls away into the long grass, and dirt sticks to the concave of your bite-mark left in its flesh.</p><p> </p><p>This isn’t— this is some fantastical little world that Adam and Fergus have invented inside his house, and Fergus isn’t sure if it was ever really constructed to hold more than it already does.</p><p> </p><p>Does he want it to? He doesn’t know, and he knows <em>exactly</em> why he doesn’t know; he’s not sure he can trust Adam with his answer.</p><p> </p><p>•</p><p> </p><p>This Christmas, Fergus ends up driving to his mum’s alone. About a month ago, Adam’s sister decided to get a divorce and for whatever reason he’s obligated to spend time with her during this ‘hard time’. Or something. Fergus’ perception of the whole thing isn’t the most unbiased, considering the fact that, to his knowledge, Adam loathes his sister and she loathes him. They don’t talk all that often and when they do, Adam will be in a bad mood for days after.</p><p> </p><p>Anyway. Fergus isn’t worried about him. Probably. Maybe. Fergus feels like he <em>shouldn’t</em> be worried about him, because Adam is actually competent and can handle himself. But Fergus worries about going to visit <em>his</em> mum who is an all-around good and loving person, and Adam says he and his sister haven’t got on since their parents died which was a whole decade ago now. So.</p><p> </p><p>He’s not worried. He doesn’t want to worry.</p><p> </p><p>The day after Fergus gets home from his mum’s, Adam comes over. He lets himself in and kicks his shoes off and asks Fergus how he’s been whilst he gets himself a drink, and Fergus cannot help but note his tiredness. The pallid look on his face. The stiffness of his shoulders as he stands in the kitchen and opens a beer bottle.</p><p> </p><p>“How’s your sister?”</p><p> </p><p>Adam makes a face. “How’s your mum?”</p><p> </p><p>“Okay,” Fergus says, perhaps a bit too scathing, “sorry for asking. And she’s fine.” There’s a moment of silence before he adds, “She missed you.”</p><p> </p><p>“That’s because I’m a fucking delight.”</p><p> </p><p>He must notice, at some point, the increasing expression of concern on Fergus’ face, because he then leans in and starts kissing him. His hands are cold, Fergus notes, as they slip under his shirt and rest on the small of his back.</p><p> </p><p>“I fucking m—” Adam starts, but he doesn’t finish whatever he was intending to say. He just stands there, staring at Fergus for a brief second like he doesn’t even know why he’s there. Like he can’t feel his breath on his face. And then he shakes his head and says, “I’m so tired, Ferg.”</p><p> </p><p>“Join the fucking club.”</p><p> </p><p>Now Adam’s laughing. “I literally told you to go to bed earlier. I tell you all the time and you just don’t.”</p><p> </p><p>“So take your own advice?” Fergus suggests, but Adam doesn’t say anything in response. “Adam?”</p><p> </p><p>“Yeah, I’m just—” Adam’s hands are hovering over Fergus’ chest, and he won’t meet his eye, so Fergus grasps his wrists and that seems to catch his attention. “I’m <em>fine</em>.”</p><p> </p><p>“Adam.”</p><p> </p><p>“Fergus,” he says, <em>sneers</em>, and Fergus has to bite back an insult. He’s still clinging onto Adam, and doesn’t really want to let go right now. Not when he’s being like this.</p><p> </p><p>“Can you please stop being a prick for, like, two minutes and just talk to me,” Fergus starts, and he doesn’t really think about what he’s saying as he continues because he’s tired and stressed and, “because I’m worried about you?”</p><p> </p><p>And then Adam goes very still and something in his face softens, before being replaced by a sharp and angular grin. “You’re worried about me?” he asks, incredulous and mocking tone apparent, and Fergus can only roll his eyes, can only pretend that his face isn’t as flushed as it is.</p><p> </p><p>“Only because you’re being fucking weird,” Fergus says, and Adam knows he’s lying. Because he’s smiling.</p><p> </p><p>“I am fine,” Adam insists, slipping his hands properly into Fergus’ and squeezing them. “I’m just in a bad mood, I’ll fucking— it’s fine.”</p><p> </p><p>“It wasn’t, like, total shit, was it?”</p><p> </p><p>Shrugging, Adam wrinkles his nose up. “I mean, it— it was fucking horrible, actually, but it’s not a big deal.”</p><p> </p><p>“You don’t have to go see her.”</p><p> </p><p>“Well—” he’s leaning back against the counter now, but still gripping Fergus’ hands and pulling him closer— “if I don’t she’ll fucking ring me and go on about, like, how I’m ruining everything and it’s my fault the family is— yeah. Plus, now she’s having a complete meltdown about being single.”</p><p> </p><p>“Really?”</p><p> </p><p>“Yeah,” he says, nodding. “I think marriage fucks people up. Like, you either stay stuck in the same miserable relationship until you die or you have to admit you were <em>that</em> wrong about something so big.”</p><p> </p><p>Adam’s parents got divorced when he was a teenager. Fergus knows that. He sometimes wonders how his parents might’ve ended up if they’d had the sense to do the same, and then he thinks about Adam’s family life and feels like a complete asshole for having that perception of something as traumatic as divorce.</p><p> </p><p>“You’re biased, to be fair.”</p><p> </p><p>Adam looks at him like he’s just said something particularly stupid. “Everyone is biased about everything, idiot.”</p><p> </p><p>That night, when they go to bed together for the first time in a whole week, the longest stretch in quite a while, Adam circles his arms around Fergus’ waist, and in a quiet voice asks after his mum. And they have a brief conversation like that, like they’re two mates catching up in the pub, when the reality is this; two and a half years ago, Fergus kissed Adam and since then they’ve been living in this strange limbo, this little fucking bubble that just cannot be burst. And within that bubble, they eat, sleep, love normally. Within that bubble, they’re fucking— they’re everything. And they’re nothing.</p><p> </p><p>Fergus wants the bubble to burst. Does he not? Is he not stuck in this perpetual battle between being honest with himself, his truest self, and maintaining a face he’s spent the past six years crafting. That Adam has also been crafting. How can Fergus throw away everything he and Adam have worked for, even if it’s <em>for</em> them?</p><p> </p><p>•</p><p> </p><p>As it turns out, over the next few months as the election looms, the bubble might burst in a way Fergus doesn’t want. DoSAC is underwhelming as of late, given how little shit is slung their way, and Fergus almost misses the energy of late nights spent at the office slaving over absolute fuck-ups for the sake of— of whatever Fergus and Adam have been trying to hold onto for the past five years. That all-important non-power, the thing that keeps them ticking. More significantly, Fergus now thinks, the thing that kept them together.</p><p> </p><p>It’s strange, because Fergus doesn’t quite know if he can imagine a life with Adam outside of this current setting, outside of their job and their role and their purpose. Despite the fact that they’re basically a cohabiting couple, because they <em>aren’t</em> that, and if Fergus thinks about that for too long he has to lie down. He cannot fathom doing this, all of this, without that little preface: it’s just the job. How can they possibly contain these intricate rituals without the constraints of a job that calls for it, how could they ever angle away from the mutual destruction that, as mid-April comes, begins to feel more and more inevitable?</p><p> </p><p>They are back in Eastbourne, where this chapter of the story began, and Fergus feels sick. He feels as though he is going to die, standing in the apartment Adam bought for them all those years ago, an apartment haunted by successes that once seemed so big. Now they’re nothing. It is all nothingness. Nothingness in the dust on the skirting board, nothingness holed up inside the kettle, nothingness in Adam’s voice as he reexplains what they’re going to spend the weekend doing campaign-wise. Nothingness as they go to bed, together, in a space they had not yet breached as a unit.</p><p> </p><p>It makes Fergus ache, physically ache in his bones with this long-held regret. Something. Some part of him was lost a long time and all he really wants is to reclaim it, go back to the beginning and do it all over again differently. Fergus wants to go back to the build-up to the last election and he doesn’t want to ask Adam to work for him. He wants Adam to throw a shoe at his head and tell him to fuck off when he asks him to be with him, asks him to marry him, whatever. Fergus wants to confess the greatest sin against Adam. He wants to burst the bubble, wants to reinvent the fucking world and have it all centre around Adam, around him and Adam, not as politicians but as fucking <em>people</em>.</p><p> </p><p>That’s how he falls asleep. Longing, yearning for a future or an answer, for that something he lost. Some part, not of himself but of Adam, that he can never have now.</p><p> </p><p>Fergus stirs at some point gone five in the morning, the space in bed next to him empty as it often is. He’s got some press thing today at a bookstore, so when he peels himself from the mattress and almost tumbles down the stairs he isn’t at all surprised to see Adam in the kitchen, brewing tea for the two of them. He’s not dressed yet, hair disheveled, and there’s a scrape of stubble on his face. He looks perfectly fragile, and comfortable, and at ease. He looks lived-in, aching and warm under the stream of yellow light coming in from the window. Dust particles catch in it, dancing above the draining board that Adam has emptied since waking up, hovering in the steam from the kettle.</p><p> </p><p>This is it, Fergus realises. This is it for him. He is going to wake up each morning at whatever ungodly hour he has to if he can come downstairs to this sight. To Adam, making him tea he’d no doubt bring back up to the bedroom if Fergus didn’t get up before he was finished. To Adam, making him tea in the mug he bought him years ago when they first won the election, the one that he insisted was a joke. <em>The boss</em>. And Adam said he bought it to mock Fergus, to suggest he wasn’t quite as competent without him at his side, but Fergus didn’t really care about the malice behind it. He just thought about Adam, and how much he <em>felt</em> for him, and right now he’s thinking about the exact same thing. He wants it. He wants to do it.</p><p> </p><p>He’s smiling, not a smirk or a smug, toothy grin, just a smile. An easy, half-asleep smile that Fergus gets to kiss, gets to spend his time knowing over any of Adam’s other expressions. This, waking up each morning to such a showcase of domesticity, is going to become Fergus’ most well-loved ritual. And that tenderness, that tactility that he sees is going to dwell in his eyes, and Adam will see it too, will see a mirror image of everything he has to give, and the incarnation will be complete. They will have whatever it is that those old married couples do, without the grand ceremony that fucks up and all the paperwork and expenses and inevitable divorce.</p><p> </p><p>They can have that. They deserve that, actually, Fergus thinks. And all of a sudden, he feels so daunted by his own stupidity. His belief that this isn’t what’s meant to happen, this is unretrievable and already lost. It’s right here. Adam is standing right here in the kitchen and all Fergus has to do— the clothes are already mixed up in the wardrobe, all he has to do is <em>pop the question</em>. Burst the bubble.</p><p> </p><p>So, as Adam turns with that mug in his hands to give to him, Fergus says, “Move in with me.”</p><p> </p><p>And for a moment, a brief and innocent moment still untouched by the reality of the situation, Fergus doesn’t even realise that Adam has dropped his mug and it has crashed into the floor, fragmenting and scattering across it in little salt-and-pepper shards. The sound it made was over before it had even registered in Fergus’ mind, and now there’s just tea splattered across the floor and broken ceramic laying around amidst it. Somehow. And somehow, there’s this haunting sound of something shattering replaying in his head, and he hasn’t quite figured out what it’s from yet.</p><p> </p><p>And Adam says, “Fuck,” and Fergus says, “What the fuck,” and their words seem to tumble together in this horrible, conglomerate mess of— of whatever this is. An urban hell-scape in daylight, no vast shadows and flickering infernos to cloak it, equivocate a kind of chaotic beauty. There is nothing beautiful, or poetic, or profound in any capacity about this. But Fergus’ mug is in pieces on the floor and that makes him feel very sad. It makes him feel as though that’s not just his mug, that’s his whole heart, bloody and beating and splayed out on the tiles below. The bubble burst. The bubble fucking burst and now there’s blood everywhere.</p><p> </p><p>“What the fuck,” Fergus repeats, because he doesn’t know what else to say, because he’s trying to organise these events that have just transpired in his head and make sense of them. They don’t fit together. This is a jigsaw made entirely of mis-matched pieces, a tiny pin-prick hole meant to house a cube. And that makes him kind of angry, actually, so he says it <em>again</em>, and for the first time in what feels like forever Adam moves from his frozen state of shock.</p><p> </p><p>“Can you stop saying that?” he asks, raising his hands in a half-hearted defence of sorts.</p><p> </p><p>For a moment, Fergus splutters as he thinks of something else to say. “You— my fucking mug. Is broken, and—”</p><p> </p><p>“It’s not my fucking fault.”</p><p> </p><p>“Well, it <em>is</em>,” Fergus says, and he doesn’t mean it to be pedantic or cold. Which doesn’t really make sense, because it is. But his head feels as though it’s been stuffed with cotton wool and Adam just broke his favourite mug, Adam just dropped his favourite mug with wide eyes like a— like a fucking deer caught in headlights, and he did it because Fergus said he should move in and— and Fergus doesn’t mean to come across like he is right now, but he is scrambling for anything. For these pieces, these irreparable, unretrievable shards.</p><p> </p><p>But Adam appears to have stopped listening to him because he crouches down to pick up some of the larger pieces of the mug, tidy them away like this incident never even happened, when he makes a strangled sort of hiss and they clatter back down to the floor. And Fergus watches as dark little drops begin to plop into the thin puddle of tea, spiralling around and turning a lighter red as they spread out.</p><p> </p><p>There’s a muttered, “Oh for fuck’s sake,” that seems to hang in the air, as Adam inspects the damage and Fergus just— just stares, at the incision that stretches across Adam‘s left palm, not that deep but still bleeding in a way that just feels horrific. Like everything is falling out of place and— and it’s already gone so wrong. Something so perfect and compartmentalised has been tarnished, and now there’s blood on the floor, swirling in thin strands in the spilt tea, too red and too present.</p><p> </p><p>“Adam—”</p><p> </p><p>“What’s the time?”</p><p> </p><p>Hands clasped into loose fists and hovering before him, Fergus finally manages to recenter himself. Vaguely. “What?” he asks.</p><p> </p><p>“What’s the fucking time?” Adam is getting more irritable by the second. He’s doing that shitty fucking thing that Fergus has always hated, the thing where when stuff goes wrong he shifts the focus to other stuff that is going less wrong, and pretends like the thing that’s really wrong is totally fine, and refuses to actually acknowledge it. His hand is open in front of him and there are brownish tracks along the curves and lines of it, where blood has already run down.</p><p> </p><p>“I don’t know.” And then, because he’s angry and scared and feels a bit like he’s going to die, he says, “You need— I’m getting the first aid kit, okay?”</p><p> </p><p>“You’ve got the fucking thing at the—” Adam makes a half-hearted gesture, and Fergus doesn’t think he’s ever seen him give so little of a shit about anything, act so glazed over— “the bookshop, you need to get dressed.”</p><p> </p><p>“Adam, you’re fucking bleeding.”</p><p> </p><p>“I’m fine! I’m literally fucking fine, stop acting like this is— this isn’t the huge thing you’re making it out to be. Go shower and I’ll clean... this up.”</p><p> </p><p>Fergus laughs, but it’s that special laugh he only reserves for when Adam makes an unfunny remark at DoSAC. Forced. “What the fuck is wrong with you? You’re acting all— <em>squirrel-y</em>.”</p><p> </p><p>“What the fuck does that even mean, Ferg?” Adam nudges a larger fragment of the mug out of his way with his foot, presumably plotting a path out of the minefield that once was the kitchen floor. “I’m fine,” he insists again, and when Fergus goes to say something he places his other hand on his chest in that way Adam does, the way that always makes him stop for whatever reason. “Stop being fucking— like this.”</p><p> </p><p>“I’m still getting the first aid, prick.”</p><p> </p><p>Placing his hand over his heart, Adam feigns a simper. “You’re so sweet.”</p><p> </p><p>“Can you just fucking—” Fergus makes a circular motion with his hand as he backs towards the staircase— “sit down. Please.”</p><p> </p><p>“It’s not like I’m bleeding out,” Adam calls after him up the stairs, but only after Fergus has seen him situate himself atop the counter. And as he blunders upstairs and into the bathroom at the end of the landing, Fergus tries not to think about the big things right now. Because he needs to be thinking about the little things; little ceramic shards on the floor, a little cut that needs cleaning and bandaging, a little press thing at a little bookshop. But as he opens up the cabinet above the sink and fishes out that little green box, he can’t help but notice the tremors in his hands.</p><p> </p><p>This is— he’s <em>not</em> being weird. Adam is the weird one, he’s the one that drunkenly refuted the sentiment that Fergus is even a friend, he’s the one that tells Fergus’ mum that he never washes up at <em>home</em>, and at the end of everything he’s the one who smashes Fergus’ favourite mug over a simple question.</p><p> </p><p>So when Fergus bounds back downstairs and begins to inspect this minor flesh wound for any tiny pieces of mug, before sticking a fuck-off awkward plaster over it, he cannot help himself. Can’t keep the snide remark caught between his teeth.</p><p> </p><p>“Am I supposed to take this as a ‘no’?”</p><p> </p><p>Adam makes a strangled noise of exasperation. “Can you not do this right now?” he asks, his voice far too soft. And Fergus already knows what he means. He doesn’t want to have this conversation at this precise moment because Fergus has him stuck in place, bleeding and undressed and entirely unable to walk out the front door if things get a bit too confrontational for Adam’s liking.</p><p> </p><p>“You broke my mug,” he says, again, sounding more like a stroppy kid than intended. He is cradling Adam’s hand, which is both cold and slightly sticky, and there’s metallic smell in the air, that coppery taste that leads you to believe there’s blood in your mouth. Staring at that cut, which seems so much more gaping up close, Fergus can only press cotton wool to it and hope that somehow stops the bleeding. Does anything more than just soak it up, become saturated with it.</p><p> </p><p>“It was, like, two quid. And it had a chip in it.”</p><p> </p><p>“Stop changing the conversation.”</p><p> </p><p>“Stop acting like it’s such a big deal.”</p><p> </p><p>Fergus grits his teeth. “It’s a simple fucking question Adam. Yes or no?”</p><p> </p><p>And he watches in horror as Adam splutters, struggles to come out with a single coherent utterance. “I— I’m not saying <em>never</em>, Ferg, but—” mid-sentence, Adam notes the panic in his eyes— “Fergus, fucking listen to me. Maybe, okay? I just— it’s the election, and I don’t know what’s going to happen so—”</p><p> </p><p>He doesn’t know. And it’s all up in the air and Fergus is too, Fergus is not a commitment of Adam’s that he must remain loyal to.</p><p> </p><p>“— it’s just a big decision to make right now and—”</p><p> </p><p>Fergus doesn’t need to think twice about it. It’s an absolute in his mind. He wouldn’t care who he was in coalition with as long as he managed to keep his desk and his office and his special advisor. He wouldn’t care how the apocalypse unfolded as long as he managed to keep Adam.</p><p> </p><p>“— you’d have to fucking come out as well, you know that?”</p><p> </p><p>“What?” Fergus’ face feels flushed all of a sudden. Adam stares at him for a second with all the knowledge that he hasn’t been listening. He’s just been winding a bandage round and round his hand perhaps a little too tight.</p><p> </p><p>“Exactly, and we know you don’t want to fucking do that,” he concludes, as though it’s a flawless argument, as though it’s an unbreakable barrier. He’s crossed his fucking arms over one another now so Fergus is just stood at his side, awkward and pointless, with some crinkled anti-bacterial wipe wrappers and a roll of bandage in his hands.</p><p> </p><p>“I don’t— I mean—”</p><p> </p><p>But Adam interjects before he can formulate a sentence. “Well, you don’t.”</p><p> </p><p>“You don’t— you always act like you know my fucking mind, you know that?” Fergus says, and he’s sure he sounds a lot more upset than he means to right now. “Maybe, maybe Adam, and this might be fucking inconceivable to you because you’re a stoic fucking self-centred piece of shit who thinks he’s better than everyone else, I just <em>want</em> to be—”</p><p> </p><p>And that’s where he stops. That is where Fergus catches himself, because he has already said one stupidly honest thing today that ended in violence. Because what Fergus wants, what he wants most of all, is for Adam to stay. To not leave, when the inevitable and yet unspeakable happens. To say this is so much more than just a job, this is everything, this is the fucking sun that we orbit around. Because that’s what it is for Fergus. And he can’t say that because he knows— he <em>knows</em>, okay, that Adam doesn’t feel the same. And even if Adam had a modicum of the same feeling for him, he wouldn’t put that above daunting real-world things like Fergus is suddenly willing to do. Adam is sensible. Adam is the sort of person who doesn’t turn to others when things go wrong. </p><p> </p><p>This is just the cycle they are doomed to reenact over and over. Adam is smug and radiant and asshole-ish, and he leads Fergus to believe so many things about himself, but when Fergus finally asks to see them he is stamped on. There his heart is still, thudding irregularly on the kitchen floor, and Adam doesn’t seem to notice it.</p><p> </p><p>“What?” Adam asks him, poised and poisonous and perfect. “You just want to be what?”</p><p> </p><p>“It doesn’t matter. Don’t fucking worry about it. Don’t— I’m fine, okay?”</p><p> </p><p>And the worst part is, for a moment after he says it Fergus believes it. He thinks the world will be bearable and the atmosphere will be breathable outside the bubble, for such a briefness that it seems cruel. Because then Adam softens and leans into Fergus’ touch, places a hand on his arm and asks, “Are you sure?”</p><p> </p><p>And it’s far too genuine. Too loaded. And Fergus wants to cry but he won’t, because Adam is so able to float through all of this unaffected and feigning affection, but Fergus is crippled by the weight— the burden— whatever it is, it’s vast and expansive and unshakeable. And it’s for Adam. And it is not mirrored or echoed or reflected or <em>anything</em> in Adam’s perception of the world.</p><p> </p><p>So Fergus says he is, and resolves to be less invested in these moments, and lets Adam kiss him like it’s an apology.</p><p> </p><p>•</p><p> </p><p>The next week, they’re back in London for an evening. A brief evening at a brief book release, making small talk with people Fergus hates and really doesn’t want to have to make small talk with, especially at a time like this when everyone seems to address him with a half-smirk and imply things he already knows are true, as though he’s a fucking child. And Fergus really, really could do without that at the moment.</p><p> </p><p>“You look,” Adam says, dragging his words out as he directs most of his concentration on tying Fergus’ tie, “fucking ecstatic.” They’re leaving Fergus’ for the event in the next five minutes.</p><p> </p><p>“I’m tired.”</p><p> </p><p>“Do you actually know anyone who gets a decent amount of sleep?”</p><p> </p><p>Fergus sighs. “No.”</p><p> </p><p>“No, so stop complaining.”</p><p> </p><p>When Adam removes his hands, Fergus can’t help but stare at what is now a dark and somewhat-healed scab across his left palm. It horrifies him, in this mundane and uninteresting way. <em>Adam</em> horrifies Fergus, every day. He isn’t thinking about last weekend. He really isn’t, because it’s such a silly thing, such a <em>nothingness</em>. Everything has felt so cold lately, or— exposed. That’s a better word. And that cold exposure, it isn’t just when Adam’s not there. If anything, it’s greater in his presence.</p><p> </p><p>Fergus does not know what he’s supposed to make of that, of this, being some sort of consequence for his honesty.</p><p> </p><p>He doesn’t really want to think about the implications of it all, not now, not when he’s so far down the rabbit hole of denial, when he’s trying to take Adam with him. Hand in unloveable hand. Whatever.</p><p> </p><p>“I think I might fucking throw up if anyone tries to speak to me,” Fergus says, after an outdrawn silence, watching Adam preen and fuck about with the lapels of his jacket.</p><p> </p><p>“Well—” he’s still trying to straighten them out in the mirror— “you know, that’s probably going to happen Ferg. It’s a social event.”</p><p> </p><p>He won’t look at him, Fergus realises. He’s doing that thing that he loves to do when he’s in a bad mood, where he acts all shallow and unflappable and even more like a bitch than usual. “Yeah,” Fergus says, “okay, that’s not particularly helpful Adam. You know, just fucking stating the obvious.”</p><p> </p><p>“What do you want me to say?” He’s messing around with his hair now. “I’d advise you don’t throw up on someone at an event with press present?” And then, finally, he turns to look at Fergus and he stares him down with some sort of half-hearted discontent. “You can be such a useless prick sometimes.”</p><p> </p><p>The worst part is that Fergus thinks he can find some scrap of something fond within that comment. Thinks he can take this piece of grit and form a pearl around it.</p><p> </p><p>Sometimes, most times, times when Adam doesn’t stay glued to his side, Fergus will end up standing against the wall and clutching a drink in one hand at these events. He’s particularly reclusive tonight on account of the current culture, the interrogation fucking everyone has to go through regarding the ever-approaching. Fergus has already had enough conversations akin to a dialogue between an omniscient parent and their dead child to last a lifetime. He has already had his fill of crushing honesty.</p><p> </p><p>Adam abandoned him a while ago, actually, and Fergus is trying to not be a prick about it. Because apparently that’s what he is to Adam. A useless prick. Can he not reinvent himself, become some other person entirely? Each and every fucking day, all of these people in all of these function rooms reinvent themselves, and they smile and use abstract nouns and ignore hacks that ambush them on the streets, when in reality they’re all— they’re all dead and putrid and rotting, they’re all fucking husks of people who could’ve been anything. And every morning they scoop those festering guts back up into their open stomachs, and they walk into the apocalypse, and they pretend they are not the zombies that caused it.</p><p> </p><p>Fergus doesn’t want any of that. He didn’t realise it before, when he was outside of it, when he didn’t know about all the reinvention and rebirth. He doesn’t want to walk into the apocalypse, doesn’t want to sit inside a child-sized coffin, he just wants—</p><p> </p><p>He just wants. And is that not the whole problem? This, asking for something in return for the wardrobe space he lends Adam?</p><p> </p><p>“Why do you always look so fucking forlorn when Adam’s not with you?” Emma asks, chin jutted out, having materialised out of seemingly fucking nowhere.</p><p> </p><p>“Christ, Emma.” Fergus does not start when she addresses him, because that would be stupid. And he’s not stupid. “Don’t you have anyone better to speak to?”</p><p> </p><p>“Well,” she says, “I was going to ask Adam how miserably your re-election campaign is going since I thought you’d be more offended by that question, but he’s currently chatting up Olly and I would literally rather eat my own shit than speak to him, ever again.”</p><p> </p><p>For a moment, Fergus processes that information, and his face begins to crumple up into a frown. “Why the fuck is he talking to Olly Reeder?”</p><p> </p><p>“Yeah, I thought he fucking hated him too,” Emma says, glancing over her shoulder at the little clusters and crowds of people across the room. “That was, like, his only redeeming quality as a person.”</p><p> </p><p>But Fergus is already walking away and making some vague sounds of agreement. “Do let me know when Peter finally has that stroke he’s been angling for.”</p><p> </p><p>It’s fair to presume Emma was hoping for a bit more of berating small talk, because for a second she stutters and attempts to reorder her words. She lands on an insult eventually though.</p><p> </p><p>“Sure, if you do the same when your interview with Attitude drops.”</p><p> </p><p>The worst thing about Emma, really, is that she and Fergus aren’t even that different. Cut from the same cloth, whatever. She’s also irritatingly perceptive, and as Fergus walks off she’s fucking smirking at him like she’s just said the funniest thing imaginable. It’s not— she’s not malicious or intolerable to the degree, say, Terri is, and that itself is honestly her fatal flaw. She’s competent and somewhat likeable, likeable compared to her counterparts, and she’s smart. She can actually get under your skin in a <em>meaningful</em> way, serve more purpose than just being an irritant.</p><p> </p><p>It doesn’t actually take that long to locate Adam, who is in deep conversation with Oliver fucking Reeder of all people, and wearing a smile that Fergus recognises as fabricated, feigned, false. Fergus has never actually met or spoken to Olly, he just knows that Adam hates him and that has Fergus predisposed to hate him too.</p><p> </p><p>“Adam,” Fergus says, and he watches as Adam seems to notice he’s even there at all, and his eyes widen and his mouth hangs open for a second like he’s just been caught doing something he shouldn’t be.</p><p> </p><p>“Fergus—” there’s a brief moment of Adam forgetting how to be human, before he shakes his head and gestures to Olly— “this is Olly. Olly, Fergus.”</p><p> </p><p>In the past, Fergus has listened to Adam rant about his dislike for Olly Reeder and noted how often he’s described as <em>slimy</em>. Which now makes a lot of sense. He has a very soft, punchable face, and when he holds his hand out for Fergus to shake he really doesn’t want to take it, because when he does his suspicions of it being clammy are correct.</p><p> </p><p>“Yeah, hi.” Fergus is being purposefully dismissive, and based off Adam’s expression of growing annoyance he’s not doing a very good job of being normal either. He knows he’s interrupted something of relative importance and he just doesn’t care. He doesn’t care. He says to Adam, “We need to leave,” and he knows it’s one of the worst things he could do right now but he just doesn’t care.</p><p> </p><p>“Right now?” Adam asks.</p><p> </p><p>“Yeah.”</p><p> </p><p>There’s awkward silence, before Adam stops narrowing his eyes at Fergus and clears his throat. “Well, um,” he’s talking to Olly, “should I call you or..?”</p><p> </p><p>“I’ll talk to Dan,” Olly says, and the pieces begin to click together in Fergus’ head, “and then I’ll call you. You know, pertaining to how much of a twat he thinks you are.”</p><p> </p><p>Adam’s laugh that follows this comment is entirely unnatural. “Yeah, okay—” his hand is now on Fergus’ arm and he’s dragging him away— “great.”</p><p> </p><p>“By the way, if you’re looking for a cupboard to have a shag in, there’s a nice one over by the—”</p><p> </p><p>“Hilarious,” Adam says, before Olly has the chance to finish his little quip. A comment that is entirely sarcastic and not meant to be taken at face value, but one that makes Fergus feel a bit ill for numerous reasons. Olly’s smirking as they walk off, and Fergus watches how the tight smile on Adam’s own face fades. And then he mutters, “Prick,” and Fergus feels marginally better about this whole thing.</p><p> </p><p>“Right, so, what the fuck was that about?” he asks him.</p><p> </p><p>“Trust me, I’m as happy about it as you are. Dick.”</p><p> </p><p>Stepping out into the slight chill of the night, the doors to the building swing and slap behind them. Adam is still gripping Fergus’ arm and a part of him wants to wrench out of that. “I just— you know, Adam, I thought you fucking hated him?”</p><p> </p><p>“I do,” Adam says. He doesn’t elaborate though, just wrings his hands together and remarks, “We should call a taxi.”</p><p> </p><p>“You were asking about working for Miller, weren’t you?”</p><p> </p><p>And then Adam goes very still, and his eyes seem to be glued to the pavement. “Can we not talk about this here?”</p><p> </p><p>“Well, I— you know, what the fuck?” Fergus says, and his incoherency doesn’t serve him well. “You’re, like, going behind my back and fucking— yeah.”</p><p> </p><p>“I’m not getting in an argument with you about this, Ferg.” He’s on his phone now, and before Fergus gets the chance to say anything else he starts talking to someone on the other end about getting a car, so Fergus just stands there in the cold and folds his arms across his chest, and tells himself he doesn’t look as sullen as he is.</p><p> </p><p>The ride home is fucking unbearable. Adam doesn’t say anything, so Fergus doesn’t say anything either. He knows that if he starts speaking, he’ll get derailed from whatever small talk he decides upon and start having a go at Adam about this whole thing, and then they’ll make a scene in the back of this taxi and the fucking cabby will go and leak everything he’s heard to the press and—</p><p> </p><p>God, Fergus is tired. That’s all he can think, as he and Adam step back inside his house, and Adam puts the kettle on, and it begins to thunder throughout the walls of the building.</p><p> </p><p>“Do you want tea?” he asks, but Fergus isn’t really in the mood to answer that question.</p><p> </p><p>“I’m really fucking mad at you.”</p><p> </p><p>His tone is dead as he says it, glum and unfeeling and evoking the same sort of emotion you might get from Peter Mannion. Adam looks affronted.</p><p>
  
</p><p>“Sorry, so—” he’s angry, and whilst Fergus isn’t unused to that he is unused to it being directed at him— “you’re about to lose your fucking seat and I’m not allowed to, you know, avoid becoming unemployed for what fucking reason exactly?”</p><p> </p><p>He’s doing that thing. The thing where he purposefully misses the point in the hopes of spinning this in another way.</p><p> </p><p>“I just— feel like you’ve given up on...” and there is a silence, in which Fergus hops from ‘me’ and this focal point of the election, to an overarching ‘us’ that he worries isn’t overarching for Adam. Because for Fergus, everything at the moment seems to orbit around Adam in the half-light of the kitchen in Eastbourne, at that ungodly hour in the morning, and his crippling urge to see that every day.</p><p> </p><p>“Ferg, you’re not gonna get re-elected.”</p><p> </p><p>It’s true, and Fergus has known it for a very long time now, and they’ve acknowledged it before. But there is something about the quietness of Adam’s voice, the strained exhaustion he is barely hiding, that screams <em>this is killing me. You’re killing me</em>.</p><p> </p><p>“Is that why you don’t want to fucking move in?” Fergus asks, watching as Adam sags like some sad and decrepit sack. “Why you— you’re pretending to like Olly fucking Reeder and get in the opposition’s pants?”</p><p> </p><p>“That’s an entirely different thing.”</p><p> </p><p>There’s no hope for Fergus masking his scoff. “Oh, right,” he says, “you’re just trying to avoid me at all costs in all aspects of your life for different reasons. Yeah.”</p><p> </p><p>“What the fuck is your problem? You’ve been all fucking— I don’t even know, you’re acting like some manic clingy girlfriend, like you’re entitled to fucking— to all my time. And I literally do <em>everything</em> for you, Fergus,” Adam says, and Fergus knows he’s right. But that just pisses him off even more.</p><p> </p><p>“Yeah, well, I never <em>asked</em> you to do everything for me. You just did. So I guess that’s your own fucking problem, the fact that you’re— I don’t know, incapable of letting me do things for myself.”</p><p> </p><p>“Oh, that’s fucking rich coming from the guy who’s currently shitting himself inside out because I’m trying to make sure I have a job, you <em>cunt</em>.”</p><p> </p><p>“But it’s not— I don’t care about that, I just— it just feels like you’re—” <em>leaving me</em>. But Fergus can’t say that because in Adam’s eyes, he wouldn’t be leaving anything other than a job, right? To imply that this was ever anything more than that to him, attentive Adam doing his job with an unscrupulous commitment, would leave Fergus looking so fucking stupid.</p><p> </p><p>But Adam antagonises him all the same. “What? I’m doing what?”</p><p> </p><p>“Nothing. Fuck off.”</p><p> </p><p>“You’re acting like an ungrateful little shit of a kid, Ferg, you know that? I— I gave up everything for you, which was fucking terrifying because unlike you I can’t just pick up the fucking— pieces of my career and go crying to mummy about it, and you don’t care,” he says. Spits. “You don’t see any of that, you just think ‘oh, Adam’s trying to leave me,’ and you think that’s <em>unreasonable</em>? That I fucking— that everything I have is entirely my own, and I can’t— I don’t <em>have</em> anyone else, Fergus.”</p><p> </p><p>And Fergus thinks <em>you have me</em>, but then he realises; Adam really does just mean the job. If he’s so worried about money, he can just stay with Fergus, Fergus who would always provide for Adam. He could move in with him. But that’s hardly the problem here, money isn’t really an issue, and what it really comes down to is the fact that Adam doesn’t <em>want</em> to. Once Fergus loses his seat, Adam is— he’s leaving.</p><p> </p><p>And just like that it all comes spouting up in this horrid frenzy of shit, a torrent of hurt and misunderstanding. These harsh, abstract shapes are thrown against the wall like an angular tide, crashing and splattering and staining and watching this argument unfold from where they dry into the paint, like angels, passive and unable to stop the fallout of something a benevolent god, if there even is one, Fergus hopes would want to stop. Hopes they would see any worth in whatever he has scraped together, ravenous and half-starved, from the pieces of Adam he holds. So he screams what he says next, hoping they might hear it in the heavens.</p><p> </p><p>“No, Adam, you’re making me feel crap because you fucking <em>are</em>, because you don’t seem to give a <em>shit</em> about my career, or, or—” <em>us</em>— “my feelings or <em>me</em>.”</p><p> </p><p>Silence swallows up the space between them, in the kitchen, after that. Adam is very still and unmoving, until he sniffs and brings a hand— a trembling hand— up to his face and pinches the bridge of his nose. Fergus gulps on the lump in his throat and feels his tongue’s dry surface stick to the roof of his mouth. He feels like he’s about to throw up.</p><p> </p><p>“I don’t give a shit?” Adam asks, slow and reserved to a point that is agonising. Gritting his teeth before answering, apologising, is a mistake on Fergus’ part because it gives Adam the time to carry on without training wheels. “Do you think I didn’t give a shit the time I threw away a job at Whitehall for your non-existent political career?”</p><p> </p><p>When Fergus still doesn’t answer, he continues, “Do you think I didn’t give a shit the time I spent hours every night staying up and preparing you for the inquiry? Or the time I wasted three months getting on the good side of that insufferable blogger who wanted to spin a story about you being a misogynistic piece of shit?” His tone is too strained to be calm, but he’s quiet in a way that unnerves Fergus all the same. “I didn’t give a shit the time you were sick with flu and I took on all your work so you could rest up, and came to see you and take care of you? Or how about the time I spent my winter break at your sodding mum’s with you because you didn’t want to go home alone another fucking year?”</p><p> </p><p>“Adam—”</p><p> </p><p>“Not even the time I rented out that shitty flat for you six years ago, and I forgot about buying a sofa-bed or anything and you did too because why the fuck would you think about anyone other than yourself, so I slept on the fucking floor for the first three days?”</p><p> </p><p>“Please don’t,” Fergus starts, but his words are broken and he doesn’t really have anything to say. And neither does Adam, apparently, because he has just resigned himself to standing in the quiet, the kettle long since finished boiling, staring at Fergus who in turn can only eyeball the floor, expecting an answer. An admission; <em>you never gave a shit.</em></p><p> </p><p>The incessant ticking of the clock on the far wall seems to grow louder each second. There is a distance between Fergus and Adam now, this growing void that mimics the space between the stars in its emptiness, its cold and vast nothingness.</p><p> </p><p>And then Adam, hugging himself and looking harrowed, starts for the kitchen door and mutters, “I’m going to bed.”</p><p> </p><p>For some utterly deranged reason, Fergus breathes a sigh of relief. Because he’s not leaving, he isn’t storming out in some thunderous and dismissive cloud. He is staying. If there’s one thing that Adam will always do, that Fergus needs him to do, it’s stay.</p><p> </p><p>The tea is left unmade, and Fergus doesn’t even have the heart to brave the kitchen again all evening.</p><p> </p><p>A few hours pass before he has the stomach to climb the stairs, by which point Adam is already asleep. He doesn’t look peaceful. Fergus changes and washes his face of all the grime from that fucking event, staring at himself glumly in the mirror as he cleans his teeth. And then, spitting into the sink, he switches off the last light in the house and slides into bed in as soft a manner as he can muster. The mattress shifts slightly under his weight but Adam doesn’t stir. He’s out on his side, his back turned to Fergus under the lowlight.</p><p> </p><p>In the darkness, Fergus can only lie there and stare at the hard line of Adam’s back against the wall, and something bubbles up inside him with a crushing pressure. Some un-swallowable feeling that compels him to do what Adam does every night; shuffle across the space between them, wrap his arms around Fergus’ waist in a loose and noncommittal way and leave his breath falling on the nape of his neck through the night.</p><p> </p><p>But Fergus doesn’t, no matter how much he might want to, no matter how much he feels holding together Adam is something he owes him, because he is a coward. Clenching and unclenching his fist, he becomes aware of just how much he needs Adam. His closeness, his warmth, the desire that he fills Fergus with; to eat him whole, to consume him, to become him. And that, the sky crashing down along with that resound truth, leaves Fergus lying awake for longer than he might like, tossing and turning over losing everything.</p><p> </p><p>Waking in the morning to a cold, absent space by his side, Fergus fears for a moment that Adam has already left. But, stumbling down the stairs in a panic, dazed and without his dressing gown, Fergus is greeted by a sight his mind’s eye photographs and frames on the fucking wall.</p><p> </p><p>Adam is in the kitchen, and he is making coffee with the French press, and sunlight streams in from between the gaps in the blinds so that it casts striped shadows across his back and makes him almost glow. There is something ethereal and sacred about that, Fergus thinks, Adam in the kitchen. It always fucking is. He is in the kitchen and he kisses Adam for the first time, he is in the kitchen and he asks Adam to move in with him, he is in the kitchen and simply in awe of this absolute piece of scum and his gentleness, his kindness, reserved only for Fergus. </p><p> </p><p>“Morning dickhead,” Adam says, not looking up from the coffee he’s currently pouring. Fergus staggers a little further into the kitchen as he begins to understand that they will not be discussing what happened last night.</p><p> </p><p>“Adam.”</p><p> </p><p>And Adam replies, “Fergus,” in a tone that you might not recognise as sarcastic if you were as exhausted as Fergus, and knew Adam to the opposite extent Fergus did.</p><p> </p><p>And this is the problem. This is the fatal flaw. See, all that time ago that Adam suggested Fergus should get more sleep he didn’t listen. And consequently he walks through life half-asleep, consequently he stands in his kitchen whilst the word fractures around him and is far too tired to do anything about it other than the one thing he knows. The nothingness of circling his arms around Adam’s waist and pressing his head between his shoulder blades, resting there in a moment of solace. It should be this sweet, tender moment, should give Adam a tangibility Fergus thinks he’s been lacking recently. This should be the moment that Fergus clings to Adam with all his strength and manages to hold on, to keep him inside his chest cavity safe and sound.</p><p> </p><p>But Adam’s shoulders tighten and rise under his touch, and his breath hitches. Fergus is inclined to write that off as surprise at the coldness of his own hands, until he lets go, and the softness returns to Adam in a betrayal of his true feelings.</p><p> </p><p>Adam leaves that morning, goes back to his own flat that Fergus is reminded he has, and he doesn’t visit again over the weekend. He just gets into Fergus’ car on Monday morning, on the way back to Eastbourne, and Fergus doesn’t think a thing of how touch-averse he is because they’re in public. He doesn’t think a thing of it for the rest of that day, or night, or the next few days and nights, and it is only at one in the morning on Friday, lying in that bed in the flat in Eastbourne with the knowledge that, on the other side, Adam has his back turned to him, that Fergus thinks something might be horribly wrong. Not, just a bit awkward, a bit stilted in the fallout of an argument.</p><p> </p><p>No, Fergus thought this was the healing period. He thought he could tie his own tie for five days and let Adam work through whatever the fuck he’s dealing with, but apparently—</p><p> </p><p>Apparently he can’t?</p><p> </p><p>Because when they get back to Fergus’ on Friday evening, the place Adam once lovingly dubbed <em>home</em>, and did so nonetheless in front of his fucking <em>mum</em>, he does not kick his shoes off and loosen Fergus’ tie. He stands in the porch shifting from foot to foot and Fergus— Fergus, not quite yet disillusioned and only half in love with him, reaches out to hold him, to pull him in, invite him inside. And that’s when Adam says it. That awkward and ill-fitting statement, like little pieces of sea-glass someone has tried to piece together not quite realising those rounded edges and mismatched origins will never create a clear image.</p><p> </p><p>“I think— I’m gonna go. Home.”</p><p> </p><p>And that stays in the air for a few minutes, growing stagnant as Fergus tries to decipher it. And Adam stands and stares at him, hopeless and— and <em>forlorn</em>, and that just makes Fergus prickle with an age-old insecurity. And then he realises what this is. He realises that this would be a breakup, if he and Adam had ever been anything at all. He realises that he’s just Adam Kenyon’s last proper girlfriend, he’s just his boss and his employer and maybe at a stretch his friend, and that’s all this ever was and as the world begins to burn Adam is making his exit.</p><p> </p><p>But for Fergus this is doomsday. This is the end of the world, and he’s lived through that before but it was only because he could come home to Adam, Adam who he trusted with every part of himself, Adam who knew him so intimately, Adam who came closer than anyone to— Fergus. Fergus felt married to him, he realises with crushing clarity. Fergus had planned out everything in his future to orbit around Adam, had crafted a world in which it was always going to be them holding onto whatever they had.</p><p> </p><p>Fergus never thought, not even once, that Adam would be the one to rip that, that map of the stars and solar systems and all their planets, out of his hands.</p><p> </p><p>“Okay?” Adam asks, and he runs a hand through his hair, and Fergus knows he only does that when he’s nervous. <em>He</em> used to do it to soothe him. “I’m gonna go home and then I’ll see you on Wednesday.”</p><p> </p><p>“And Thursday,” Fergus says, which seems like a stupid thing to say right now, but he cannot bear the thought of Election Day without Adam.</p><p> </p><p>“And Thursday, idiot.”</p><p> </p><p>And Fergus gulps on the lump in his throat and stares at Adam, Adam in the half-light in his porch, Adam looking tired and miserable and like he’s already six feet under, and he does not know what to say. He doesn’t think he can say anything that will fix this. Cotton wool. It just soaks it all up, and it’s still there. Saturated, now.</p><p> </p><p>To anyone outside of the world that Adam and Fergus live in, this is the strangest sight of all; two men standing at either end of a hall, both about to burst into tears as they part ways for the weekend. But they had constructed all of this together, these intricate rituals that make up what their relationship was. The elaborate nature of refusing to acknowledge any deeper intimacy in their actions, of pretending they’re still just good friends and colleagues whilst also posing as a couple for Fergus’ mum. This, in truth, is the breakdown of the most well-loved, handcrafted machine, made up of twigs and cobwebs and snail shells, beating like a heart, transmitting a pulse that can so easily be stamped out. Why Fergus put all his life savings into this and ended up with so little to show for it, nothing at all, he cannot explain.</p><p> </p><p>So, he does the one thing he knows he can. He stands in his own hallway, <em>forlorn</em>, chest heaving and heart hurting, and he expresses in a thin voice what he knows. What he wants to know.</p><p> </p><p>“Adam.”</p><p> </p><p>But the front door is already opening and Adam is stepping outside without so much as a goodbye. And Fergus is left there, and his name still feels like a lead weight in his mouth, and— and—</p><p> </p><p>He does not sleep that night.</p><p> </p><p>He hardly sleeps in those last few nights leading up to Election Day, and on Wednesday he is in Eastbourne and Adam is leading him around all these little tick-boxes for the day, their final day, their final push for what has already fallen through the cracks, and Fergus tries not to be bitter about the fact that Adam will take the sofa bed in the apartment tonight. And on Thursday, when he loses his seat in a particularly miserable manner, after a particularly miserable day outside the polling station, Adam does not squeeze his shoulder or his hand. He just claps along with the rest of the crowd, all gormless and ogling as everything Fergus values falls apart around him.</p><p> </p><p>And the worst part is that Fergus doesn’t even care. He is numb to the loss of the thing that allowed him so much time with Adam anyway, cannot even begin to process that change in his life when Adam— he’s not— they’re not anything anymore.</p><p> </p><p>There is a flood of messages from people, people Fergus might actually want to speak to like his mum, people he doesn’t want to speak to like Emma and the ex-boyfriend he’s still civil with, but he doesn’t answer any of them. Adam is talking to someone, some woman with a smile and some hair, and they’re so fucking conversational and casual and right now, even though this isn’t a Catholic church that Fergus is trapped inside, he wants to go and spill his guts out at the confession booth.</p><p> </p><p>He doesn’t. Of course he doesn’t. He just slips back to his apartment, his beginning and his rebirth and now, a very shallow and undecorated grave. He gets a text from Adam about an hour later, asking where he is, and another twenty minutes after that he’s unlocking the front door and letting himself in. And Fergus has been sitting on the sofa and drinking a beer with a sombreness, a pallid greyness to his face that he’s sure makes him appear long dead. And he really doesn’t want to talk to Adam, who has just decided to sit next to him. Like that’s something they do anymore. Like that is allowed, within this new set of rules Adam decided to construct for them.</p><p> </p><p>“Are you okay?”</p><p> </p><p>“No,” Fergus says, because there isn’t really a point in lying. And he doesn’t care if he makes Adam uncomfortable, or guilty, at this point.</p><p> </p><p>In the silence, Adam gets a notification on his phone, and Fergus watches with half-open eyes as he reads it, processes it, pulls a face and turns his phone off again. Tucking it in his pocket, Adam dares to meet Fergus’ eye and says, “Reeder.”</p><p> </p><p>“He made you an offer?”</p><p> </p><p>“Yeah.” Adam shrugs. “It was a few days ago.”</p><p> </p><p>Fergus blinks. “Right.”</p><p> </p><p>“What’re you gonna do? I mean,” Adam hesitates, “do you have anything lined up?”</p><p> </p><p>“No,” Fergus admits, fully aware how foolish that was. He has severance pay, sure, and— and Adam’s right, he has his <em>mum</em>, but the thought of slogging out of bed and around looking for a new job is something he doesn’t think he can face for another twenty years at least. No, Fergus just wants to rot here in this apartment, where it all began. Under Eastbourne lights.</p><p> </p><p>He’s working his thumbnail under the label on his beer bottle, which happens to be a convenient distraction from looking at Adam. The adhesive mixes with the condensation on the glass and creates one of those truly awful textures, the sticky and slimy and altogether unpleasant type.</p><p> </p><p>“You’ll find something,” Adam insists, a softness to his voice that Fergus missed these past few weeks. And then this wonderful, wicked smile creeps across his face and he jokes, “You could write a fucking book.”</p><p> </p><p>“Fuck off.”</p><p> </p><p>“A fucking— like, an exposé on DoSAC. Dedicate it to Glenn, slag Terri off, just so fucking <em>withering</em> towards Peter. You could get a job at the Sun or some shit off the back of that.”</p><p> </p><p>This makes Fergus snort, and the corners of his eyes are crinkled, and Adam is sitting at an awkward angle— staring straight at him with this look of intent, shoulder pressed up against the back of the sofa— and the proper laugh that escapes him is an utterly hopeless one. Here is Fergus, and he has already lost Adam, but he is still clinging to the clothes that used to house him like there’s some phantom form of him inside them. Like he’s still tangible, still able to be touched and held and—</p><p> </p><p>“Fuck you, Adam.”</p><p> </p><p>His brow furrows, and he’s jutting his chin out. “What?”</p><p> </p><p>Thudding, something is thudding somewhere. Fergus wants to— he doesn’t even know. There is nothing bitter and violent enough, no action that matches the magnitude of Fergus’ rage right now. How many times will he allow himself to be taken in by this, how many times will he grow disillusioned and spit Adam out from between his teeth? How many fucking times.</p><p> </p><p>“Fuck off,” Fergus says, and then he’s standing and he’s saying, “fuck you,” and Adam— Adam hasn’t looked more lost in his life. And that just makes Fergus even more mad, because here is Adam and he’s acting as though he has any right to be here, any right to look at Fergus and make him laugh and make him feel <em>good</em>, because he doesn’t do that, he just makes Fergus feel like he is dying. Over and over and over again. He is being stabbed to death one more time and it is because he’s not— what he wants is not something Adam echoes. And that’s not fair. That might’ve been fair if Adam had never lead Fergus to believe otherwise, but he didn’t.</p><p> </p><p>Hand outstretched, Adam goes to place it on Fergus’ chest. And he says his name, his full name, not that fucking nickname he’s still not sure he likes, is now thinking he hates, and it is so soft and compartmentalised, unlike anything Fergus has ever heard before. It sounds like— it sounds like Fergus, last Friday, it sounds like glass breaking and birds dying and falling from the sky, it sounds like horses eating themselves alive and it sounds like— like whatever else is awful in the world.</p><p> </p><p>“Don’t fucking— don’t pretend like you care,” Fergus says. “Stop. Just fuck off, okay? You talk all this shit and— and— and fucking insist you’re so great and you do whatever, but you don’t actually care. About me. Me, who I am behind closed doors.” His own hands are pressed to his chest now and Adam is watching him like he couldn’t be more envious. “Like, okay, I’ll give you the fucking benefit of the doubt Adam. You gave a shit about Fergus Williams MP, you wanted him to look good, you wanted people to like him, you were willing to do whatever for that guy. But I’m— I’m not <em>him</em>. I have lost <em>everything</em>, and you don’t care about someone with nothing to give you, so just fuck off and leave me alone. And fuck you.” His voice is breaking. “Fuck you.”</p><p> </p><p>“Ferg—”</p><p> </p><p>“Fuck <em>off</em>, Adam.”</p><p> </p><p>There’s this horrible moment in which Adam scrambles for something to say, and looking back Fergus will feel nauseous over it. But he does not care in the moment, as Adam struggles to even comprehend what he’s saying. “I— you don’t— <em>you’re</em> the fucking prick who—”</p><p> </p><p>He is breathless and unable to finish his argument and Fergus can only wonder why. Under his breath, Adam mutters something, and frowns deeper. “I care about— I want—”</p><p> </p><p>“I don’t give a shit,” Fergus says, except he doesn’t really say it, it’s far too loud for that. And Adam winces and sucks in a breath and shakes his head.</p><p> </p><p>“I know you don’t. Okay?” He shrugs. “I know.”</p><p> </p><p>And that confuses Fergus, because here is his narrative; Adam does not, and has never felt the same. Has never been falling like this, has not been falling for the past seven years. And now he’s leaving, because he has exhausted Fergus’ usefulness to him.</p><p> </p><p>So why has he just flipped that on its head? Why is he Fergus, standing at the end of the hall and being lead to believe someone he cares about never gave a shit?</p><p> </p><p>Fergus doesn’t want to know. Fergus doesn’t give a shit. Fergus wants to eradicate all traces of Adam from his life, wants to scrub away his touch with bleach and iron wool against his skin, wants to burn all his old clothes. He wants to forget what he smells like.</p><p> </p><p>“Fuck you,” he repeats, and doesn’t even know how many times it’s been now.</p><p> </p><p>Adam‘s face is something akin to a crumpled paper bag. And Fergus doesn’t understand that. He is too sad, and too heartbroken, and too bitter to even begin to understand that.</p><p> </p><p>“Fuck you, Adam. Fuck off and fucking— never— just <em>don’t</em>.”</p><p> </p><p>“Yeah,” Adam says, poisonous and apathetic and like he’s dying. His hand is on the door handle, and as it cracks open Fergus doesn’t question this with an atom of his being. “Okay.” He’s nodding, and smiling, but it’s empty. And then he says, “You’re welcome.”</p><p> </p><p>And he’s gone.</p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>iii</strong>
</p><p>farewell— thou art too dear for my possessing,</p><p>and like enough thou know’st thy estimate...</p><p>...for how do i hold thee but by thy granting,</p><p>and for that riches where is my deserving?</p><p>— sonnet 87, william shakespeare</p><p> </p><p>It is six days, after that, before Fergus’ phone rings with a call from anyone vaguely important. And it’s his mum. And, most horrifically, she sounds surprised when Fergus answers.</p><p> </p><p>“Hello love,” she says, and then follows up with a phrase Fergus will never understand the purpose of, “it’s only me.”</p><p> </p><p>“Yeah, hi Mum.”</p><p> </p><p>He’s sprawled out in bed and dragging a hand across his face, trying to figure out what the fucking time is. The clock on the bedside says it’s six o’ clock, but it’s far too dark outside to be that time in mid-May. There’s this awful feeling of exhaustion weighing down on him, paired with disorientation, and together they’re making mincemeat of Fergus’ head. He hasn’t wanted to leave bed in days. No, he’s been content rotting away, turning into nothing more than a dark stain on his own mattress.</p><p> </p><p>“I wasn’t expecting you to answer,” his mum continues. “Is Adam home?”</p><p> </p><p>Fergus’ mouth feels very dry all of a sudden. He’s too sleep-rumpled and fragile for this conversation. “Mum, did you ring <em>my</em> mobile to talk to Adam?”</p><p> </p><p>“No,” she insists, “it’s just that he usually answers for you.”</p><p> </p><p>“Right.”</p><p> </p><p>“How are you, anyway?” she’s asking now, and Fergus has to take a second to compose himself before supplying the most pathetic answer imaginable.</p><p> </p><p>“Fine.”</p><p> </p><p>He can hear her sighing on the other end of the line. “Are you sure?”</p><p> </p><p>“Yes, Mum.”</p><p> </p><p>“<em>Is</em> Adam home?”</p><p> </p><p>“Mum, I—” and this is the moment that Fergus catches himself. Because his mum is listening to his every word, waiting for something, and he can’t bear the thought of telling her— telling her all that. And she can’t see him as he agonises over it, cannot see him blink and pinch the bridge of his nose and hesitate for far too long with his mouth hanging open. She can only hear him sniffing softly, and if she asks Fergus will tell her he has a cold. “No,” he says after what feels like an hour but was probably only a few seconds, before inventing a lie that could be true; “He doesn’t get back til seven.”</p><p> </p><p>“Oh, is he enjoying the new job?”</p><p> </p><p>Wincing, Fergus nods for no real benefit. “Mhm. Yeah.”</p><p> </p><p>“Well that’s good.”</p><p> </p><p>“Yeah,” Fergus breathes, and hopes the unsteadiness of his voice doesn’t betray him.</p><p> </p><p>On the other side of the line, he can hear his mum catch her breath between her teeth. And then they click together in a little, motherly, disapproving tut, and she asks again, “Are you <em>sure</em> you’re okay, love?”</p><p> </p><p>And crumpling like a fucking paper bag, clutching his phone like it’s a fucking lifeline, clinging to composure as though he’s not already fucking lost it, Fergus screws his face up and inhales, sharp, and musters yet another, “Yeah.”</p><p> </p><p>And he knows she’s unconvinced. Of course she is. But this is one of those horrible and silent moments in which someone realises they are too far away to reach someone, they’ve already driven so far past and whatever they were searching for is behind them. Been and gone. So she parks the car, and gets out, and has a long, meandering walk in which she talks Fergus’ ear off about her own life, and this new cardigan she’s started crocheting, and Fergus nods and notes his tired smile, and is grateful when she says her goodbyes and lets him go without another probing question about his well-being.</p><p> </p><p>After she goes, in the quiet and darkness of his room, Fergus finds that he wants to cry. Not that he does. No, he goes downstairs and makes a cup of tea, and stares out of the window and remembers last summer, how he and Adam sat out in the garden during the longer, lighter evenings, and drank and made bad jokes and acted like they were so untouchable. Like they were part of this exclusive little club and were the only members, the only ones privy to intimacies the world could not comprehend.</p><p> </p><p>Fergus ruins a good thing. That is the chapter title of this particularly shit part of his life, and he doesn’t quite grasp how he ruined it in the first place but he knows he did. He knows that Adam had come to him on election night with <em>some</em> intent, and it hadn’t been malicious, and instead of listening to him Fergus had— yeah, Fergus had fucking ruined a good thing.</p><p> </p><p>And now Adam hates Fergus, and Fergus is thinking maybe he hates Adam too. Not how he used to hate him, not back when they first met and Adam was just a twat without any charm. No, Fergus hates Adam now in an entirely new way, because Adam has never been this bad before, has never given Fergus reason like this. Has never been so self-centred and conceited and convinced of things that just aren’t fucking true. He went as far as he could go, and when Fergus asked him to take one more fucking step he just refused. Didn’t even toe the line.</p><p> </p><p>And that’s the fucking problem, actually, that’s the bullet that Adam seems to carry around inside of himself. His pride. His disgusting need for self-preservation, his fucking high horse that he always has to get on, Adam, spineless and amoral Adam who doesn’t have a fundamental belief to his name. Adam always has to win. He always has to be fucking right.</p><p> </p><p>Adam hates Fergus and Fergus hates Adam. And it’s not that age-old hatred, not one framed by the setting of a profession, a workplace. This is a hatred bred in the safety of their home, is one they fed and watered and sunned together, a hatred cultivated by— by whatever they had. That compartmentalised relationship. And now they’re still linked together, by that same sin, whatever pieces of themselves they put into this hatred.</p><p> </p><p>How fucking sad. That Fergus has lost entire parts of himself to hating someone else, to destroying the false heaven they didn’t deserve.</p><p> </p><p>One night, Fergus has a dream and in that dream he asks Adam a question. It’s a yes-or-no question, simple, a one-word answer. Adam answers yes, but he doesn’t stop there; he says he resents it. Fergus has another dream and in that dream, Adam asks him if he resents his advice. And Fergus says he does, but he doesn’t tell Adam it’s because he’s usually right. A third dream; Fergus asks Adam why he doesn’t care anymore, and all of a sudden they’re back in Eastbourne and Adam looks like he’s dying and he says <em>I do</em>.</p><p> </p><p>There’s currently a big scandal in the press because some Tory MP got outed for sleeping with his special advisor. She’s resigned since and there’s pressure for him to do the same. It’s a bit ridiculous, honestly, because everyone knows that everyone sleeps with everyone in Westminster. People do not have functioning relationships outside of politics when they have those sorts of jobs, cannot do whatever it is normal people do to find love or— well, Fergus doesn’t think that’s what it’s about for most people. It’s not as important as whatever current power struggle is on-going, does not hold a candle to the value of control and influence.</p><p> </p><p>He wonders if this is why all of this happened. If he and Adam simply could not function outside of this framework, the job and the roles and the purpose. Was this something born out of convenience? Was it fabricated by a culture in the workplace?</p><p> </p><p>Conflict of interest. That’s what the papers say. That is the phrase Adam used to utter with a smug tone, and then Fergus would tell him to stop being a fucking idiot. And now Fergus thinks <em>he’s</em> the idiot, because he spent all this time believing he and Adam had drawn a line between personal and professional, somehow, had made choices that weren’t dictated by their job.</p><p> </p><p>Fergus thinks about Adam, and he thinks about what he would say to him right now if he had that opportunity. He guesses he does. He still has his number. He could ring him, press his phone to his ear and hear Adam’s breaths down the line and listen to that for who knows how long, maybe hours before he even said a thing. And he would say, <em>you can be so inconsiderate</em>. And then Adam would probably say that’s not true, and list off a bunch of pedantic examples to prove his point. And Fergus would hang up and go back to hating him.</p><p> </p><p>It has been one month since Election Day, and Fergus does not dream anymore. Today, he sat cross-legged on the floor in front of his wardrobe, and stared at the shirts hanging inside it that do not belong to him.</p><p> </p><p>Some of them, he’s still not sure who does own them. He hates that. He wonders if Adam will ever come back to get them. He doubts it.</p><p> </p><p>He is going insane. Fergus feels fucking deranged and it’s probably because he never goes outside anymore, but he loathes the thought of going anywhere and seeing anyone, and he cannot bear to step out into the garden right now. He misses summer. It is summer. He is hungry so he drinks. He is tired so he stays up.</p><p> </p><p>There is only one thing that feels consistent in Fergus’ life. One piece of logic left; he hates Adam and Adam hates him. Adam horrifies him, and Fergus horrifies himself. They are horrible. They are bad people, who do bad things, and smash stuff up and refuse to care or listen and then walk away into their nothingness. Of course they did the same to each other. Of course they did.</p><p> </p><p>So why is there a little ball of remorse curled up inside Fergus’ stomach? Why does he want to reach out and say sorry, sorry for the scene in the kitchen, sorry for saying everything out loud?</p><p> </p><p>He doesn’t know. He does know, but he doesn’t want to know.</p><p> </p><p>Wanting and not wanting. Why has that dictated Fergus’ life for so long?</p><p> </p><p>Over the next month, he resigns himself to a numbness. If he embraces the nothingness, he cannot want, and at the same time he can’t not want. You cannot not want nothing. How can you possibly not want something that doesn’t even exist? If it doesn’t exist, it cannot be a thing you can reject.</p><p> </p><p>Fergus is just making up riddles now, meaningless riddles that do nothing for him.</p><p> </p><p>He has one more dream. In it, Adam brings Fergus a cup of tea and Fergus doesn’t say thank you, but he smiles at Adam instead. And then Adam says <em>you seem to really care about me but only when you want me to do something for you</em>. And Fergus feels sick to his stomach, because Adam sounds so tired, and he knows none of this is real, he knows it’s just something sad and fabricated and already over, but it means something. Does it not? Is this not everything, Fergus’ entire fucking life?</p><p> </p><p>So for some reason, a reason he doesn’t quite understand yet, Fergus says <em>you do too much for people</em>. And it probably sounds horrible but Fergus thinks he means it in an entirely different way, and then— and then he thinks he gets it. He gets <em>why</em> Adam does too much for him, and he stirs and sits up and thinks—</p><p> </p><p>And forgets.</p><p> </p><p>The answer is on the tip of his tongue, but it’s fading at a rapid rate. Fergus had it, he had a dream and it all made sense, and then he lost it.</p><p> </p><p>All he has is this strange, swelling sensation in his chest that does not disappear for the next week. There’s something melodic about it, enchanting, whatever. It is the one good thing that has happened to Fergus in however long and he can’t even place it, put his finger squarely on it.</p><p> </p><p>Something. Something about a steaming cup of tea, about acts of service and secretive smiles and giving a shit. About seeing someone, seeing them for the first time, the last time, about seeing them just once more. Fergus is close but he isn’t quite there yet, and that’s when, one evening, for the first time in forever, there is a knock at his door.</p><p> </p><p>That’s where the story begins to cycle back on itself. This is where the exposition ends, the point at which the problem has been splayed out for you, delicate and taking fragile breaths. You understand now.</p><p> </p><p>So when Adam appears outside Fergus’ door twenty minutes ago, you understand his reluctance to let him in. To welcome him into the very place he rejected, to make him a fucking cup of tea and take him out into the garden so they can sit where they used to and watch the neighbour’s cat stalk along the unkept grass. It’s dark, and neither cold nor warm at this hour in July. The space between the stars is so much more vast when underneath it lies London, and its swamping air pollution.</p><p> </p><p>“I am—”</p><p> </p><p>“You know you never came back to get your stuff,” Fergus says, the response automatic in a way he hadn’t expected from himself. Maybe he really is just so angry about that, Adam abandoning a half-decent collection of shirts mixed in with Fergus’ like they belonged there. Of course they didn’t.</p><p> </p><p>Adam leans back in his chair, but there’s nothing smug about it. It feels apprehensive and oppressive at the exact same time. “Yeah—” there’s something unusually delicate about his tone— “I forgot.”</p><p> </p><p>It’s only after this that Fergus remembers telling Adam to leave him the fuck alone, seemingly forever. Only after this he realises Adam has chosen to walk around that fact. He’s not mad. Adam Kenyon is not mad when he has every right to be.</p><p> </p><p>“Busy?”</p><p> </p><p>“Not really.”</p><p> </p><p>It’s unbearable. To sit here in unhappy silence, for Fergus to keep himself from looking up at Adam, tearing his eyes from the dirt that squirms under his gaze, and not want to eviscerate himself. This is not what he knows. This is not sarcastic quips and a grin with too much tooth, it isn’t his permit to discreetly place a hand on Adam’s shoulder or the small of his back, to tip his foot up against his leg under the desk and watch until he pays him a shred of attention. This is not the quiet, sacred domesticity of watching someone else stock your kitchen with the shopping.</p><p> </p><p>“How is it?” Fergus tries again. “Working for the fucking— the foetus fuck. The... um.” His mind is blanking. He does not have the heart nor the stomach to pretend he can handle this conversation, so he submits to the almost-silence of the night.</p><p> </p><p>And then Adam is very quiet and very still for what feels like five years, before he says with a little too much clarity, “I resigned.”</p><p> </p><p>“What?”</p><p> </p><p>“Today.”</p><p> </p><p>“Why—” a nervous laugh escapes Fergus as he sits forward in his chair— “why the fuck did you do that?”</p><p> </p><p>Shrugging, Adam remains where he is. “It’s shit.”</p><p> </p><p>“Well, yeah, working for fucking— for that carbon-copy glove puppet and the Victorian Elvis impersonator with his hand shoved up his arse... that’s gonna be shit, Adam.” There’s a pause, before Fergus continues, “You know, according to you it’s all shit. DoSAC was shit, and yeah, I’ll fucking give you that but—”</p><p> </p><p>“Can you shut up? For, like, five minutes?” Adam’s voice is soft in a way that you wouldn’t really expect, his shoulders hunched. This is the kind of moment where, if Fergus were the one about to say something emotionally loaded, he’d be labelled a soppy bastard and have to sweep any desire for a substantial relationship under the rug. But Fergus shuts up all the same, because he isn’t as petty as Adam.</p><p> </p><p>Somewhere nearby, the siren of an ambulance screams through the streets. Fergus finds himself prematurely sipping his tea out of anticipation, and burns his tongue. He’s beginning to think that attempting to be emotionally available has killed Adam, turned him to fucking stone, when he finally says, “It was worse than DoSAC.”</p><p> </p><p>“Really?”</p><p> </p><p>Adam makes a face, the same kind of scrunched-up expression he wears when he’s biting back a sarcastic quip. “I mean, I guess people aren’t as insufferable. Apart from Olly,” he adds, and the almost-immediate supplication makes Fergus laugh when he feels like he shouldn’t. Force of habit. He is so used to laughing at whatever Adam says when it isn’t even funny, because that’s— he’s— he can’t not.</p><p> </p><p>“But—” drilling circles into the grain of the wooden chair with his fingers, Adam does not look up to meet Fergus’ eyes— “it— don’t fucking laugh, or like, make a joke about this okay? I just— it was more shit because it wasn’t,” he hesitates, holds his breath behind his teeth for a moment and grits them like this couldn’t be more painful. And then, he settles on something so quiet and so simple, and maybe not exactly what he means, not encompassing of all his feelings. But it is more than enough from Adam, who doesn’t do this to begin with, to track someone down from the trail of broken glass left in their wake and set about gluing it all back together again.</p><p> </p><p>“I missed you.”</p><p> </p><p>“Adam—”</p><p> </p><p>“So, sorry,” he says, muffled by the hand currently clamped over his mouth. “For being a complete prick. I dunno. I fucked up, I— I thought things were... different. And I thought you didn’t give a shit which was really dumb, and I get if you don’t anymore. After everything. And it was just really hard, thinking that, and I thought it would be easier if we... stopped. But then that was shit too. And everyone is fucking boring and irritating and I hate all of them and it’s not... it’s not the same. It was just shit, doing all the stuff we used to do without you.”</p><p> </p><p>And Fergus, he knows that feeling. He knows that every fucking day of the five years they spent at DoSAC was only made bearable by Adam’s constant presence, by his support and reassurance and advice. To attempt to continue wearing that skin, that lived-in role, when the counterpart is gone makes no sense. It’s disorientating, to go one place expecting everything as it always was and have your sense of reality come crashing down when there’s one small difference. A robust little tin for teabags sitting on the counter when they used to be housed in a cardboard box in the cupboard. </p><p> </p><p>Falling into place now is every little stumble these past few months; and there is a resounding, satisfying ‘plop’ noise when the penny flips into the wishing well, when Adam says he echoes that. They sit in the garden where the air is cool and there are no walls splattered with poor intent, and Fergus realises that he— that all of this, it was a conflict born out of neglecting what was staring them straight down to begin with. Every ‘we’ swapped for an ‘I’. That final dream that Fergus has forgotten, doing too much and doing it because they seem to care only when they want something, but that’s not— that’s not true.</p><p> </p><p>This is it, right? This is walking into the apocalypse every day and emerging hours later to— to go home and put the kettle on. To brew tea in the company of someone you love, and drink and bicker and watch the world burn out of the window. The past six years, Fergus has been living to put the kettle on at the end of everything.</p><p> </p><p>“Ferg,” Adam says, “can you fucking say something before I fucking—” he makes a vague, self-referential gesture— “combust, I genuinely— I feel like I’m going to die.”</p><p> </p><p>“I’m sorry too.”</p><p> </p><p>“Yeah, you’ve only been marginally better,” Adam comments, sipping his tea. There’s something overfamiliar about it that makes Fergus want to unfold everything he’s ever felt out into the garden. He wants Adam to know him so much better than he has, even if he’s the only person to ever know him <em>this</em> well.</p><p> </p><p>Fergus taps his fingers against the side of his mug for a moment. He’s still processing this, attempting to understand it in a way that aligns with his old-world views. “So is this— you’re— I mean—”</p><p> </p><p>“Don’t make me say it.”</p><p> </p><p>This makes Fergus grin. “Please say it,” he says, and he is so caught up in his own smugness, his crippling joy and staggering disbelief that what Adam says next prompts him to lose any sense of self-restraint at all.</p><p> </p><p>“I want to stay. With you,” Adam admits, that previous modicum of shame gone now. “I want us to be together.”</p><p> </p><p>It’s vulnerable in a way Adam isn’t, honest in a capacity Fergus didn’t think he was capable of. And it’s for him. All of this, all this time, was for him. Throwing away a job within Labour the first time, single-handedly making something out of Fergus, sticking with him through shit-storm after shit-storm, sleeping on the floor and making him tea and tying his tie, it was because Adam wanted to stay with him. Like Fergus wanted to stay with him. And the job was the only way they thought they <em>could</em> stay. Could excuse their actions, could construct their intricate rituals that they believed were entirely self-conceived.</p><p> </p><p>And in Adam’s refreshing openness, Fergus seems to forget what he himself has been trying to avoid outright saying. So he says, “I love you,” with weight, but not a cumbersome one. No, he says it like it is the single most substantial thing in this world. Because isn’t it? Isn’t this— love, for Adam— the only thing that has kept Fergus anchored to the world, this burning and weeping world, and his purpose within it?</p><p> </p><p>The thing is that Adam has never been one to put words to feelings. He’s already bridged an inconceivable gap today in saying what he has, rather than just letting Fergus know in his own way, his gestures, those acts of service and fucking intricate rituals. So for a moment, when Adam leans in and kisses him for the first time in three months, Fergus doesn’t realise he’s already answered that question rattling about in his mind.</p><p> </p><p>His hand is on the nape of Fergus’ neck and he is cradling his face and there is something so— it’s not <em>different</em>. It’s not. Fergus has never been one to believe in the power someone else could have to shape your life, but he doesn’t think this is that. Nothing changes. Not really. Because that’s the whole fucking point, the point is that Adam is <em>staying</em>, and he’s kissing him like he’s kissed him a million times before, and he’s going to kiss him again and again and again because he’s there, he’s not going anywhere, he is an ever-fixed mark and the solar system is complete and it’s something never seen before, it’s two planets orbiting around one another and the sun isn’t even there, the sun cannot touch this, it is dark and there are no stars in the sky and this— this is it. This is the end of the world. The apocalypse.</p><p> </p><p>And when the apocalypse is over, when the world falls silent and the fire is stabbed out, Fergus finds himself holding Adam’s hand. They’re lying in his bed, in the half-light from a bedside lamp, face to face, and Fergus realises— remembers— he is allowed to do this. So he does. He sees Adam’s open hand on the mattress, in the space between them, and he takes it because that is something he can do. And he wants to. And Adam lets him, watching with intent unlike anything else, as Fergus draws circles onto the back of his hand with the pad of his thumb.</p><p> </p><p>“I love you too,” he says, his voice small and tired. It’s been hours since Fergus said it and he— he honestly forgot Adam never technically repeated it. Because he didn’t need him to. Because he knew. The pieces had fallen into place at long last.</p><p> </p><p>The whole world seems to have been plunged into this darkness, this state of unshakable, immovable sleep, because everything is so languid and fluid and outpouring tonight, like an oil spill. Adam is flushed and warm, and reposed, and there’s a colour to his skin that feels like it’s been missing for a long time. Like, for the past few months, he’s been getting sicker and sicker, not in a physical sense but a mental one. He’s been pedalling backwards, regressing to the person he was when Fergus first met him; so sick to death of everything, sleeping through the days and unable to beat the lethargy off himself. Unwilling to.</p><p> </p><p>He was becoming the same bitter person who refused to do anything for anyone, who wanted to be an island nation. Who couldn’t rely on anyone for anything out of fear, who couldn’t risk what he had and had made for himself as the only thing he had at all, for someone else. Some person who did not matter as much.</p><p> </p><p>Along the length of his palm is a very faint and very thin, white line. A scar. And Fergus looks at it, really looks at it, because he hasn’t had a chance before, hasn’t been privy to this one part of Adam for three months now, and he can hear Adam’s steady breaths next to him, can feel the rise and fall of his chest with the shift of weight on the mattress. This is an untrodden path, so all Fergus can really do is squeeze Adam’s hand tighter and hope he’ll follow him down it.</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>You do too much for people.</em>
</p><p> </p><p>“I am sorry,” he says, and traces the line of Adam’s scar with his finger. “Do you think it’ll fade anymore?”</p><p> </p><p>Adam’s expression puckers up into a frown, but not the one you’d see when he’s upset. No, it’s more fragile, born out of confusion and vulnerability. “I don’t care, Ferg. It’s fine.”</p><p> </p><p>“I wasn’t— I mean, I’m sorry for the other stuff,” Fergus clarifies, after a brief moment of mental gymnastics, lining up and reordering whatever Adam’s perception of what he said is. “For being a dick and— and not noticing. Everything.”</p><p> </p><p>Adam places his other hand on Fergus’ temple and sets about smoothing his worry lines with his thumb. “Yeah, but that’s just because you’re dumb and don’t think about things.”</p><p> </p><p>“Thanks, Adam.”</p><p> </p><p>He’s smirking now, even if he’s still focused on the crease across the bridge of Fergus’ nose and refusing to meet his gaze. “You’re welcome.”</p><p> </p><p>“You’re a prick. And you are fucking horrible sometimes, but—” grasping his hand tighter, Fergus fears for a moment that this might be too much, might scare Adam off all over again— “you’re right. You do so much for me and I— I don’t know. I feel bad, because,” and then his voice goes very quiet, hardly a whisper, “you always tell me you love me with your actions and I just— I feel like I’ve been so shit. And it’s my fault. That— that you thought I didn’t care and got scared and like— everything. And I didn’t get it because I don’t— you’re right, it’s not the same for me. So, sorry.” There’s a moment of silence, as he lets that apology settle in the space between them, before he says, “I want you here. I want to take better care of you.”</p><p> </p><p>It’s only then that Adam freezes, as still as death. And that makes Fergus’ chest pull very tight, this horrific anxiety that feels like a pinprick in his heart, or the sound of rain outside your window. Cold, in this flooding rush of uneasiness, this endless limbo that seems to stretch out forever. The want to stand on solid ground versus the air your feet treads as you fall.</p><p> </p><p>But then Adam buries his head in Fergus’ shoulder, and he hears him mutter some expletive, and then he says a little clearer, “Cannot emphasise how fucking dense you are.”</p><p> </p><p>“No, I got the message.”</p><p> </p><p>Adam snorts, before rolling onto his back and lifting up their intertwined hands. “When did you realise?” he asks.</p><p> </p><p>“What?”</p><p> </p><p>“I think— like, it started before you said you were gonna run.”</p><p> </p><p>Fergus’ eyes widen. “Really?”</p><p> </p><p>“I don’t know.” Adam shrugs. “I <em>liked</em> you. Which was annoying.”</p><p> </p><p>This makes Fergus laugh. “I think I was the same,” he admits. “Like, I think that’s why I asked you. Because I wanted to spend more time with you.”</p><p> </p><p>“Aw, you had a— a little schoolboy crush on me?”</p><p> </p><p>“Adam, you literally— <em>how</em> can you be so not self-aware?”</p><p> </p><p>“Fuck knows,” Adam says, sitting up now. He’s tetchy. Restless. “Ask my mother.”</p><p> </p><p>A small smile is beginning to grow on Fergus’ face. Reaching up, he places a hand on Adam’s bare shoulder and, in the most half-hearted effort, attempts to pull him back down. “Come on,” he says, imploring, “I’m tired.”</p><p> </p><p>“Which is your own fucking fault,” Adam points out, but he comes anyway, lies by Fergus’ side and stares at him with a horribly fond expression on his face. And Fergus sees it. He sees the whole picture. Adam would do anything for him, and he wants to give him the exact same thing back. He wants them to be like that, and he always has, has always strived for them to be equals, to hold the same pieces of one another.</p><p> </p><p>What else does he have? What precious time does he have to spend if it’s not with Adam, for Adam?</p><p> </p><p>“Can’t believe I’m in love with someone so emotionally constipated,” Fergus says, because he’s tired and he wants to make Adam laugh. And it works.</p><p> </p><p>“Come on, you’re a bit fucking pathetic yourself Ferg. What happened to not letting me do everything for you?” He’s smirking now, chin jutted out, and Fergus really wants to kiss him. “Have a conversation with me yourself.”</p><p> </p><p>“I tried.”</p><p> </p><p>“Fuck off.”</p><p> </p><p>And then it’s Fergus’ turn to throw his head back and cackle. He’s still laughing, soft and quiet and content, when Adam asks, “Do you want to go the fuck to sleep or are you just gonna laugh at me?”</p><p> </p><p>“I can do both,” Fergus says, and without really putting any thought into what he’s doing, he’s wrapping his arms around Adam’s waist and assuming the position of big spoon. Which isn’t— it’s always been a very unspoken thing between them that that’s what <em>Adam</em> does, every night. And he glances over his shoulder, back at Fergus, and makes a face.</p><p> </p><p>“I hate you.”</p><p> </p><p>“What?” And then Fergus feels a pang of panic in his chest, and sits up and pulls away. “I— I just thought—”</p><p> </p><p>But, reaching up and grasping at Fergus’ hand, Adam guides him gently back to his previous position. And there’s a softness to the action, this intrinsic and guilty want behind it. “No, it’s—” there’s a sigh caught between his teeth, something that sounds familial to any moment of vulnerability Adam has ever had— “just... stay there,” he says, and for a moment Fergus doesn’t even think to breathe because this is all too indulgent.</p><p> </p><p>This is it. Adam is coming to find him, Adam is apologising and admitting feelings, Adam is letting himself be little spoon. And Fergus— Fergus is going to hold onto that for as long as he can. He’s going to spend the rest of his life reenacting tonight, and each time he’s going to fall a little bit more in love with Adam, and he doesn’t know what he’ll do in the hours of sunlight before that but he doesn’t think he needs to. Right now, Fergus could not care less about what he’s going to do when he wakes up tomorrow morning. For all he cares, the world could be burning and there could’ve been a fucking government coup, but he wouldn’t even know. Because he’ll be staying here, with Adam, and Adam will be staying with him. Together.</p><p> </p><p>Adam is holding his hand, and Fergus can feel him kiss each of his knuckles with a certain tenderness. An attentiveness.</p><p> </p><p>“This is nice,” Fergus comments, voice low and face pressed into the crook of Adam’s neck.</p><p> </p><p>“Unusual for us.”</p><p> </p><p>“Shut up. You’re such a pissy bitch.”</p><p> </p><p>Smirking, Adam tilts his head at an awkward angle and says, “Yeah, but I’m <em>your</em> pissy bitch.” And then, after a moment’s silence, he adds, “That’s the shittiest thing I’ve ever said. Maybe we should break up.”</p><p> </p><p>Fergus snorts against his neck. “Maybe we should.”</p><p> </p><p>“Your mum would be so mad.”</p><p> </p><p>And Fergus holds him just a bit tighter. “She’d get over it,” he says.</p><p> </p><p>“Literally fuck you.”</p><p> </p><p>In the morning, a bright white light is streaming on through the gap between the curtains, and Fergus thinks to himself that he wants this moment to last forever; him, holding Adam as he sleeps and the sun begins to warm the earth. But then he starts to stir and rolls over onto his other side so he’s face-to-face with Fergus, and he smiles and kisses him before getting out of bed. The space next to Fergus is now cold, but Adam is taking his hand and tugging at it.</p><p> </p><p>“Come on,” Adam says, “I’m gonna put the kettle on.”</p><p> </p><p>And they don’t talk about the future for the first few hours of the morning, but eventually Fergus brings it up and Adam makes some joke about how they should have a huge, public coming-out and then move to Brighton and run there. And Fergus says that’s fucking stupid because they’d have to join the Green Party and he refuses to do that on principle, and Adam smirks because he has succeeded in annoying him.</p><p> </p><p>And Fergus thinks <em>I’m going to marry him</em>, but he doesn’t say it, because he doesn’t think he needs to. He makes Adam a cup of tea. They kiss in the garden. The world does not stop for them, but Fergus doesn’t fucking want it to. The one thing he wants has come back to him and lead him by the hand into a brand new landscape, out of the apocalypse.</p><p> </p><p>Journeys end in lovers’ meeting, right? Fergus doesn’t think he’s particularly wise, and Adam seems hellbent on convincing him he’s the dumbest man who ever lived, but there’s something in that.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>what’s to come is still unsure: </p><p>in delay there lies no plenty,— </p><p>then come kiss me, sweet-and-twenty, </p><p>youth’s a stuff will not endure.</p><p>— twelfth night, william shakespeare</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>on a vaguely more serious note, thank you so so so much for reading!!!!! i am very sorry. if you wanna sue for emotional damages take that up with eloise this is all their fault. </p><p>hmu on tumblr @wastelanddais i make hilarious posts about being trans, shakespeare and bbc ghosts. do not come in my inbox and tell me youve read adamfergus fanfic because of my blog despite having not seen ttoi because i will lose it. if any of you guys are reading this rn, hate yall</p></blockquote></div></div>
</body>
</html>